Nobody is on holiday!

 

I thought this was the holiday season when everybody went away and the internet hit a periodic lull.  Nope.  The US heatwaves and the UK washout seems to be keeping people indoors, so there's been plenty of interesting stuff to keep me entertained this month, and here are a few things that I think you might appreciate, read plenty more after the jump:

 

Eventually - Show & A.G. LP Is Coming

For nearly a year it's been talked about, leaked, hyped, pre released etc etc, but it seems that it's now actually going to happen for real.  This is the first track from the full LP and if it's anything to go by then the LP will be some real grown man rap (at last).

 

Total Eklips

French beatboxer Eklips gives us a Hip Hop history in 4 minutes of top notch beatboxing .  He covers everything from Planet Rock, to Tupac, Public Enemy to Dr Dre and everything significant in between.  It's good fun trying to name the tunes and keep up with how quickly he flips them.

Banned (for the wrong reasons)

Not so long back, I looked back at the contribution of the 2 Live Crew in the late 80’s. During my review I committed to upload their full length VHS home video that was released in 1991.
Well, spare time has been scarce in recent months, so I’ve not had a chance to do it yet, but for once this has worked in my favour.  Instead of me sharing an old VHS rip, someone on YouTube has uploaded a laser disc version for our viewing pleasure.

Now cast aside any thoughts you might have about Luther Campbell and his somewhat unique brand of sex rap, and let us remember that the 2 Live Crew took on the US justice system to define what freedom of speech really meant.
I didn’t care how many times they use the word bitch on their album, nor how many times they used the F or N words (or any other profane or derogatory term), but I was deeply concerned about record store owners being told what they could or couldn’t stock. [Hell, I remember the only reason I copped a copy of N.W.A.’s 2nd LP was because I knew the store owner, and even then he made me buy a bullshit album and gave me N.W.A.’s album free with it so that he couldn’t be accused of selling banned album!].
If the American do-gooders had won this particular argument, it could have opened the door for wholesale censorship on a grand scale!!! So, unexpectedly, I find myself thanking Luther Campbell for fighting for our freedom of speech (but I still won’t buy his records, lol).

Watching this home movie 20 years on, I’m seeing it all from a whole new angle, and I find myself wondering whether the right outcome would have been a compromise between the do-gooders and the 2 Live Crew. Whilst I’m completely against the suppression of freedom of speech and artistic expression, I’m pretty certain that the 2 Live Crew’s victory effectively gave every record exec full authority to put as many scantily clad hip hop honeys, shaking their ass, in every video they could without the fear of being challenged. And lyrics could now be as derogatory as you like, cos hey, nobody’s going to challenge it. The problem isn’t with the derogatory content, it’s that those who specialise in this field are extremely limited in almost every other aspect of lyricism. I’m not thanking Luke for that!

What’s also interesting is the attitudes of the people, and their appetite to stop this type of music from damaging the kids, even though rock and roll had already committed most of the same crimes several decades before.

This video contains excerpts from the infamous Donahue interview, footage of the concerts that got stopped, the record store that got raided etc, along with the usual live footage and videos for the singles.

It's A Demo

I'm often found digging around in the bowels of the internet trying to find rare and elusive stuff that I've failed to obtain over the years, and sometimes I find things that I didn't even know existed until I stumbled upon them.  It's much like crate digging, but I'm not restricted to vinyl, I'm not seeking any holy grails and I'm not in dusty old record shops inducing frequent fits of sneezing!  Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking crate diggers.  I've happily spent many months of my life in those dusty old dungeons, but that was the old days, I'm mostly digital now. And besides, there isn't a high street store or online retailer that sells that old TV clip, concert footage or demo tape that I'm looking for, so alternative methods must be adopted.

While researching hip hop archaeology via the power of the internet, I usually wind up on some defunct blog page that once shared a rare gem, but the download link is now dead.  This sets me off on a wild goose chase to find that item elsewhere.  Successfully finding what I want is currently about 50/50 (it was higher before the demise of Megaupload!).

There is one minor problem with this hobby and the techniques I employ.  Just like a crate digger, you tend to overlook the main retailers.  This rarely concerns me, but every once in a while I find that hidden gem sitting somewhere fairly obvious and easy to find, which brings me to this post.

I was recently digging around when by fluke I came across a gem of an article on the Complex.com website.  Now maybe in the week this was published I was heavily dozing or on holiday or something, but whatever the reason was, I completely missed it.  What surprises me most though, is that something this good wasn't blogged or tweeted much more widely [if someone tells me it was, then I'll have to admit to being in a self induced coma!]. 

So what is this little gem that I'm banging on about..... well, it's only 30 demo tapes from some of the biggest and most influential artists in the rap game!!!  Each of these tapes has been digitised for your listening pleasure and most of them are essential listening. 

More Knowledge

I recently shared an old recording of what I believed was the UK Rappin' Championships and asked if any of you knew anything more about it. Well, thankfully someone came forward who knew quite a lot about this event and has provided a considerable update. So here’s a follow up post to share this information with you, along with some video footage of the event!
But before I start, I want to say a big thanks to Shan Dookna for taking the time to help out and share his extensive knowledge.

The event name is still unconfirmed, but I think I’m safe to assume that it probably wasn’t officially called the UK Rappin’ Championships, which would also explain why the all knowing internet didn’t return anything when I started digging.

The competition was actually held as part of the DMC DJ Mixing Championships, and in 1988 these were held at the Hippodrome in London. However, another trawl of the web still doesn’t provide much fruit, the main focus is purely, and understandably, on the DJing. This leads me to believe that this freestyle competition was mainly a warm up show before the main DJ event.

Shan tells me that the judging panel included members of the Cookie Crew and Mike Allen. In my original post I pointed out that the audio cuts off before the winner is announced, but I can now confirm that the winner was in fact Fresh J, who was apparently from Huddersfield. The final battle between Fresh J and MC Brooklyn is actually on YouTube and can be seen here:



One of the female emcees on the recording went by the name of Jazzi P. Shan tells me that this is the same Jazzi P that later went on to work with hip house producer Les Adams. She had a couple of commercially successful singles, as a soloist under her Jazzi P name, but also as the vocalist for Adams’ group L.A. Mix, who had a reasonable hit with the track Get Loose on which Jazzi fires some rapid rhymes. But like what happened to many artists who jumped on the hip house bandwagon, it didn’t take them very far.

Funk, History & The God MC

Here is this months round up of interesting offerings from around the internet:

 

DJ Format - Hip Hop & Funk Mix

Thanks to Battlechaser for bringing my attention to this great mix by acclaimed DJ and produced, DJ Format.  A clever mix of Hip Hop and Funk that he put together to promote his live set with Simonsound on the 18th August.  Check it out.

DJ Format - Hip Hop & Funk Mix by Soundcrash on Mixcloud

Rakim - Mini Documentary

It's only 10 minutes long, but any amount of time with the god emcee is always an intriguing experience.  Some nice little clips of old freestyles on the streets of NY are included too.

Mixtape History

Unkut.com recently produced an interesting article that documents the origins and evolution of the mixtape.  Personally I never really gave a thought as to how the original mixtape came about, but having read Unkut's brief lesson in mixtape history, I've certainly had an enjoyable history lesson (which is more than ever happened to me at school).

I should make it clear, this isn't about the modern mixtape that unsigned artists use in an effort to get noticed, Think of the old Kid Capri and Ron G style of mixtape. 

Your lesson awaits you:
http://www.unkut.com/2012/07/40-years-of-hip-hop-tape-culture/

Demo-lition

 

Yesterday there was a lot of buzz around the web about this awesome mixtape from Rock Steady DJ, JS-1. It’s 3 hours of demo’s from major artists, most of which were big in the 1990’s. Don’t get me wrong, the line up looks stellar and there are quite a few that I’m eager to hear, but when you take a minute to consider some of these joints, I’m not convinced they are all true demo’s.

For example, we know from many different stories how Eric B & Rakim’s early material came to be, and there certainly wasn’t a Rakim demo tape kicking around. So what I think we really have here is a collection of tracks that are either cuts that didn’t make the album, unused remixes, or early versions before they were fully mixed down etc, with a few demos thrown in for good measure.

Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t make the mix any less interesting (in fact it probably makes it better as demo tapes can, understandably, sound very amateurish), but it’s good to keep things in perspective. I’ve included the full track list after the jump, along with the download link.

And if hearing a demo from your favourite golden era artist is your kind of thing, keep an eye out over the next few weeks as I’ll be posting 30 more demo tracks, and this time they will be the proper original demo tapes!

Mike Check.

A Fresh Lick of Paint

Hello peeps. The new site is now up and running, and there have been a few changes to the appearance and layout. It also seems to be operating a little slicker than before (not that we had any problems previously).

We've been running for nearly two years, and so it seemed a good time to tart the place up a little bit. Be careful as you look around though, there's still some patches of wet paint :)

Mike Check.

Do you know anything about this?

Whilst digging in my (digital) crates looking for something a little different to share with you, I stumbled across an mp3 rip that intrigued me. The file name simply said ‘UK Rappin Championships 1988’. I’ve had this for quite a while, so I can’t remember where, or who, I got it from. “Not a problem” I thought, I’ll just do a quick Google search to find out more.

But this is one of those items where the all knowing internet surprisingly returns zilch!!! I’ve got cassette rips that I consider more obscure or rarer than this, but most of them have turned up on blogs or YouTube. Yet this is a national championship akin to other competitions like the DMC, so it seems strange that it’s undocumented. I tried several popular search engines and numerous variations of search text, but the only thing I can find is an entry on Last.fm that has no description. This has just made me all the more curious. This is a part of UK hip hop history that is clearly undocumented, so if you know anything about it, however trivial, then please leave a comment below and let’s see if we can build a better picture of this event.  On the plus side, it does mean that this is probably an exclusive to FoaWP!

If you listen to the embedded music player below, you can hear that it sounds like an officially organised event and one of the first emcees to appear is an MC Einstein. I can only assume that this is the same Einstein that was signed to Music of Life records in 1988. Other named emcees are MC Brooklyn, Jazzy P and Miss Delight, but I think there are other uncredited emcees.

From what I can make out, the format was to line up a number of emcees and let them take turns, as opposed to the now traditional battle style of head to head dissing. However, there are still some nice little battles within this format (listen at around 6:15 for a good example of this). The host also makes a reference to ‘last year’ so this wasn’t the first or only event of its kind.

Whilst the judges are deliberating who the winner is, an unknown beatboxer entertains the audience which includes a nice little tribute to the kids TV programme Rainbow. The biggest travesty though is that whoever edited this from its original cassette omitted to include the announcing of the winner, duh!

The whole affair has been edited down to just less than 25 minutes. As you would expect with a recording of this age, it’s got the atmospheric cassette hiss in the background, but this doesn’t detract from the lyrics, if anything it’s a timely reminded of what we used to endure without really noticing it.

So, can you remember this event? Do you know where it was, who hosted it, or any of the contenders? Let’s hope someone can shed some light on it.  Leave a comment below if you have any info.

Update - Some of the questions here have now been answered.  Check out the update here.

Mike Check



Alternatively, download the mp3: https://hotfile.com/dl/156219942/d041742/UK_rappin_championships_1988.mp3.html

De La Soul

The month of April saw the (incredibly quiet) release of De La Soul's Plug 1 & Plug 2 presents... First Serve, the latest LP from the group’s front men.

I’d forgotten that this LP was in production and its stealthy release did nothing to bring it to my attention, nor will it help its sales.  As a result, I’ve not yet listened to it so I’m not going to comment on it.

Instead, when I accidentally spotted that the album is now out, it reminded me of several De La Soul videos I have sitting in my archive, and I subsequently realised that De La Soul haven’t made an appearance on this blog yet. So I think it’s time to put that right.

I wanted to upload the original 3 Feet High and Rising VHS release from 1990 that accompanied their debut LP, but I haven’t got the time to convert if from a vob file at the moment, so instead I’m going to hit you up with this rare concert footage from 1997.

This concert was filmed in Belgium at the Lokerse Festival. In an effort to make it a little more interesting than just the plain raw footage of Plug’s 1, 2 and 3 on stage, the editor has added some visual effects. Although the effects don’t detract from the concert or the music, they’re a little odd as the quality falls somewhere between amateur home video and authorised professional release. If these effects had been added to the video when it was recorded in 1997 then I probably wouldn’t have commented, but according to the closing credits the film was edited in 2008!

But don’t let any of this deter you from watching this DVD as the trio delivers a balanced mix of tracks from their early albums (which some might say was when they were at their best), all tightly pulled together and well performed.

Tracklist and embedded video after the jump.

Latest Bloggings

Here is this months round up of goodness from around the web and bloggasphere.  As is often the case with my highlights from the web, it's a mixed bag of old and new, but hopefully it's still full of the realness that us true hip hop heads are in need of (if not, please let me know in the comments section).

Before I get into some of these gems, I want to welcome Moyinka to the FoaWP team. He's an experienced blogger who shares many of his old school rarities (1986-1991) over at the To The Break of Dawn blog (which I recommend you check out). I think he's got something slightly different planned for this blog, but I don't want to spoil any surprises.

Up North Trips Presents The 10s

The fella's at Up North Trips have paid homage to one of the most significant album releases of the 90's, Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's Mecca and the Soul Brother which celebrated it's 20th anniversary earlier this month. 
They've picked 10 tracks from the album and focused on the samples and beat construction to highlight the complexity and ingenuity of Pete Rock's production and thus the major influence his work has had on other producers ever since.  The end product is a brilliant mix of the original samples blended with the finished tracks.
You can listen to the mix on the Soundcloud player below, but I'd strongly recommend reading the full article to gain the full appreciation of this mix. 
 

Large Professor - Part 2

Following on from last months update, Extra P continues to break down his classic records in part 2 of Complex's review.  He not only talks about his productions, but also the tracks he featured on as an emcee working with people like Nas, Pete Rock, Beatnuts etc.  He also gives insights behind Nas' groundbreaking track Rewind (the one where he tells the story in reverse). 
http://www.complex.com/music/2012/06/large-professor-tells-all-the-stories-behind-his-classic-records-part-2/

Kurious & A.G.

Kurious is back with a new joint which features A.G. on the mic and Diamond D on the boards.  It's not what you might expect from Kurious or the DITC veteran, but it's still funky all the same.  Thanks to the DJ Premier Blog for sharing this.



Mike Check