Golden Age Hip-Hop/Rap

[Surf]

Hits keep coming... Soren Baker did a great Shock G remembrance.

RIP to a Gregory Edward Jacobs, truly a unique one.

[Surf]

Hypothetical, Political, Lyrical, Miracle Whip
Just like butta, my rhymes are legit
Cause I'm the Humpty not Humpty Dumpty but Humpty Hump

Art by Shock G. RIP.

[superduperman]

Humpty Dance is, objectively, the greatest rap song ever. Anyone who disagrees is both wrong and a bad person.

[Styles]

[Hypestyle]

I still remember a show with Public Enemy, Digital Underground, KRS-One, and other 80s/90s acts in Detroit, August 2005, shortly after hurricane Katrina hit. Shock G, it is a horrible loss. He had a lot of talent. Played piano, drums, bass. he produced for other acts, of course. The Luniz "I got 5 on it", various 2pac songs, collaborations with George Clinton. I wanted them to come back with more albums in recent years. The "classic rock" era has never quite taken off for most hip-hop acts. After their initial run on the charts, people get informally written off as just "oldies" acts, instead of looking at them as veterans that still have talent. A lot of folks from Shock's generation in rap end up quietly touring internationally to make money, when American promoters and venues are not cooperative anymore. The royalties issues becomes more complicated when it comes to rappers/hip-hop acts who used sampling, plenty of the retroactive lawsuits (and the imbalanced initial contracts) have taken away much of the publishing.

[Hypestyle]

2020 interview with KRS-One
https://level.medium.com/how-krs-one...n-8ad757473bd9

1992, KRS-One was at a crossroads. After a string of three gold records, his group, Boogie Down Productions, had only sold 250,000 copies of its most recent album, Sex and Violence. He was under industry fire for throwing PM Dawn rapper Prince Be off the stage during a notorious show at New York City’s Sound Factory. Some listeners complained that his music had become too preachy; others questioned his decision to drop a song like “13 and Good.” Meanwhile, BDP itself was coming apart. Other members had sued him for half the ownership of the group, and he’d recently split with his wife, Ms. Melodie, who was also a part of the crew.
Sitting at the Tokyo airport while on tour in support of Sex and Violence, that year, he wrote the lyrics for a new song. He called it “Sound of Da Police.” There wasn’t a particular incident that inspired it. Nothing had occurred between him and the authorities in Japan. The L.A. uprisings had happened earlier that year, but they weren’t consciously on his mind. The song’s inspiration was straightforward and ingrained: generation after generation after generation of Black people experiencing unfair treatment and violence at the hands of the cops.
“When you’re from my hood, from the Bronx, it’s like every day we go get milk, eggs, and **** the police. We have no respect for that institution at all.”
“It’s just every day, **** the police, straight up,” says KRS-One, speaking on the phone from his home in Atlanta. “It’s still like that to this very day. July 2020: **** the police. When you’re from my hood, from the Bronx, it’s like every day we go get milk, eggs, and **** the police. We have no respect for that institution at all.”
“Sound of Da Police” wasn’t the first time KRS called out police harassment and criminality in his music. With BDP, he had released songs like “Illegal Business,” “Who Protects Us From You?” and “30 Cops or More.” The cover of 1989’s Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop featured an image of him on a stoop being confronted by a Black cop. Still “Sound of Da Police” would be his most indelible indictment. Beyond becoming a Golden Age rap classic, the song’s reach has spread and tangled over the past 27 years, following unexpected paths that have taken it to everything from dance music remixes to the soundtrack of an animated kids’ movie — and, most recently, the intro for Kanye West’s newest song. Though it was only a moderate hit when it was first released, “Sound of Da Police” currently has over 56 million plays on Spotify, dwarfing any other song in KRS-One or Boogie Down Productions’ catalog by more than 30 million streams.
And it almost didn’t happen.
KRS didn’t plan on keeping “Sound of Da Police” for himself. He wrote it for his protégé Heather B, who at the time was appearing on TV screens across the country as one of the housemates in the groundbreaking first season of MTV’s The Real World. Once KRS returned to the U.S., Heather B recorded a version of the song over a track produced by KRS’s brother and frequent collaborator Kenny Parker; ultimately, though, she decided it wasn’t a good fit for her.
At the same time, KRS was putting together what would become his 1993 album Return of the Boom Bap — to help refresh his career, he wanted to put it out under his own name — and he needed beats. Part of that quest was a visit to see producer Showbiz in the studio, where he found Showbiz and rapper Freddie Foxxx looking depressed. Foxxx had been working on his debut album, but the underground beats he was choosing weren’t impressing his management team. “I was bringing them some raw **** and they were like, ‘No, we want melodies. We need radio play,’” says Foxxx now. “I never really cared about that.’”
Foxxx and Showbiz played KRS one of the rejected tracks called “8 Bars to Catch a Body,” a rugged beast that sampled Grand Funk Railroad’s “Inside Looking Out.” The beat, KRS realized, might pair perfectly with the lyrics he’d written for Heather B.
But everything changed in December 2009, when the song appeared in the trailer for Kevin Smith’s Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan buddy comedy “Cop Out.” Stripped of its context, it became not a warning about the police, but a theme song for them — a gag to replace “Bad Boys” by Inner Circle.
Foxxx wasn’t disappointed to see the beat end up with KRS-One, the man he calls his favorite MC. “I’m not like the rest of these bucket-ass motherfuckers — one minute they love you, one minute they don’t,” he says. “I loved that he had that beat, because I knew he was going to kill it. He made a better record than I did. I was just rockin’ the mic; he made a concept out of that ****.”
“Sound of Da Police” wasn’t just a concept; it was a conflagration. Driven by a dizzying, propulsive beat, KRS floats in and out of Jamaican patois the way he had on “The Bridge Is Over,” challenging the authorities with lines like, “We run New York/Policeman come, we bust him out the park/I know this for a fact, you don’t like how I act/You claim I’m selling crack, but you be doin’ that.”

[ed2962]

Happy Mother's Day!

[Surf]

Shoutout to Letterman.

[Surf]

[Surf]

[CliffHanger2]

Shoutout to Letterman.

This guy is so underrated. Never knew him and DMX had a beef until years later.

[Surf]

Rest In Peace to another one. Prayers out to the family of Biz Markie during this toughest of times, 57 is to young for a life spent bringing joy and Hip-Hop to people. At one time this guy was the point man at cross-section of a lot of heat over a building block in Hip-Hop culture, the sample. Ironically his voice been sampled many times over the decades and was still active, I just heard his voice interviewing Sinbad of all people a couple months ago on Rock the Bells. He was on Roxanne Shante's show too on the same channel. So sad.

[Surf]

My favorite, favorite Biz record will always be The Vapors. Every guy has had degree's of this records they felt they'd performing in their own life one day.

"Damn it feels good to people up on it". RIP.

CAN YOU FEEL IT, NOTHIN CAN SAVE YA
For this is the season, for catching the Vapors.
And since I got time, what I'm gonna do.
Is tell you how it's spreaded throughout my crew.

[PhoenixReborn85]

Randomly found this YouTube channel that streams 90s era hip hop. Hopefully, it doesn't get yanked like other YT radio streams.

https://melo.town/

[Surf]

Minimal hook with a hard groove, non credited feature by Jeru, slept on 2nd album- Graffiti.