Oh man, congrats to Austin, for breaking records with all our 100° days. The summer is getting absolutely intolerable - we might as well live in Siberia, for all the good the outdoors does us. And my yard work is glaring at me from the other side of my well-insulated window. Oh well, maybe this dose of hip hop will cool you off, at least temporarily!
:The Building Project - The Mentalist: Another great and well-produced collaboration from Seattle, The Building Project’s Moving Pictures has a divergent, distracting, and off-beat flow that’s somehow endearing. While they’re pushing the envelope as far as underground goes, I can’t wait until they really go crazy and traverse some all-out avant-garde paths. :Aesop Rock, C-Rayz Walz And Vast Aire - Karma Killerz: This album, by DJ JS-1, called Ground Original 2: No Sell Out features more than 40 MCs over 21 tracks, many of them veritable legends in underground hip hop. It may be the drought talking, but this track caught me from the beginning is my favorite on the album so far. The bare drumline backbeat paired with the labyrinthine lyrics of Aesop Rock and the aggressive phrasing of Vast Aire just make for a good cool-down track. :The Physics - The Session: Another Seattle group for my final pick - The Physics’ High Society EP is free on their website and it’s one you’ll want to snatch up. The jazzilicious beat and quick tempo flow on this track by MCs Thig Natural and Monk Wordsmith suck you in - and this track has some neat tongue-twisters.
:Marley Marl - Dropping Science (Featuring Craig G): Known as one of the greatest producers in Hip Hop History, Marley Marl was the king of sampling as producer of the Juice Crew and many independent and notable acts. He’s really the producer who shifted hip hop from electro beats (a la Afrikaa Bambaataa) into the sampled beats and reprogrammed drum loops that we identify as hip hop today. It’s weird to think that most hip hop doesn’t use a single live instrument, and that most today is done straight from a computer, but keep in mind that that’s what makes much of it (the good stuff, anyway) an underground or fringe phenomenon - it’s affordable! You don’t need years of expensive lessons or handcrafted instruments to create beats, you can just record the sounds you hear everyday and make a track in your bedroom. I know that’s a tangent and Marley Marl didn’t have a computer or do any recording in his bedroom, but it's an important point to make when you’re listening to a composition made by scavenging (in a good way) bits and pieces from other songs. This track comes from In Control: Volume 1, originally released in 1988, and just re-released with a lot of neat stories about the tracks.
- Leah Manners
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