Hip-Hop Vinyl Trip: Part I

I’m taking you on an extended trip through my hip-hop records¹. I’ve got all my singles lined up in order of tempo and I’ve got my LPs handy. Here we’re covering the ground between 75 and 89 beats per minute.

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We start by dropping the beat from Beastie Boys’ High Plains Drifter. One of the greatest beats ever, it mainly is just The Eagles’ Those Shoes with some extra 808 bass drum. I use this as a foundation for the acapella of Little T & One Track Mike’s song Guidance Counselor. You probably haven’t heard of these fellas; I only know them because they performed at my co-ed frat in college, so I was able to pick up this single. Guidance Counselor features Slick Rick as the counselor. Fun little track to get us going, leading into the full Beasties track.

Here I get into what I call leap-frogging, playing one track then throwing the next track’s acapella over the first’s instrumental, then bringing the full second track, then moving into the next one with its acapella. So each track has a novel element while I use all the recognizable parts. We get They Don’t Dance No Mo from Goodie Mob, acapella while we stick with the HPD loop. Cee-Lo is Goodie Mob’s most prominent member, and they all drop nice verses here. No chart impact for this track, but I’m glad to have it. From there I leapfrog into Awnaw (“Awnaw hell no man, ya’ll done up and done it”) from Nappy Roots. Fun note about these guys, they stayed at a hotel in College Park MD my now-wife was working at back in ’03. They smelled like fun. Their Kentucky-fried flavor plays nice with the Dungeon Family ATL sound brought by Organized Noize on the Goodie Mob track.

Quick detour to the South Bronx for Boogie Down Production’s 9mm Goes Bang, laid on top of the pregnant Awnaw organ sound. BDP’s debut album, Criminal Minded, had the sparsest beats around, sometimes just naked drums, sometimes accented by bass, guitar, or horn bleats. The open space was a worthy canvas for Blastmaster KRS-One, one of the greatest lyricists ever who stands the test of time and—along with Rakim—helped bring in a new era of conscious and clever rhyming at the tail end of the first school, presaging De La Soul, Tribe, Gangstarr and the like. 9mm Goes Bang, like much of Criminal Minded, is confrontational and boastful, KRS-One rhyming about taking out his enemies.

Back to the South and the Dungeon Family for two Outkast tracks: Git Up Git Out and So Fresh, So Clean. The first features a great guest verse by Cee-Lo about struggling through demeaning jobs and reliance on relatives, while counting on music to give him purpose and elevate him from his downtrodden state. So Fresh So Clean (with Sade’s Ordinary Love underneath because who doesn’t need that?) is familiar, a worthy followup to Ms. Jackson (their first #1).

Here I Go by Mystikal is one of my longtime favorite beats, similar to but much more sinister than High Plains Drifter. You may know it as the music that introduced Cedric The Entertainer on The Kings Of Comedy. Makes me bounce like a boxer, so I’ll throw some acapellas over it before moving on. First I let Mystikal do a couple verses, then bring in DMX acapella doing Who We Be. DMX has a great voice and this track is a passionate run through what he knows of life, from his neighborhood to his stint in prison to the reality facing black youth all over—”The options: get shot; go to jail; or get your ass kicked”. Staying on top of Here I Go I bring the acapella of Outkast’s Elevators (Me & You), verses about coming up, featuring their typical (for them) off-kilter meter with a counterintuitive laid-back tongue-rolling quickness. Up next on this beat is Ms. Fat Booty by Mos Def. Mos Def is definitely in my top five MCs of all time², and this is a nice little story song with one of my favorite snippets to scratch (“Aiight c’mon then let’s go”). After this I drop the last verse of Elevators before switching beats to DJ Shadow’s Six Days remix featuring Mos Def (can’t get enough), a rumination on the state of the world at the turn of the millenium.

Passin’ Me By has been a favorite since I first recorded its video off Yo! MTV Raps. I was thrilled to get it acapella on a UK import single in a DC shop in 2002. I’ve used it on a Portishead beat (on The Hop, 2003) and on a reconstruction I did of a 1974 Miles Davis track (on The Freshness, 2013). Here I put it on the instrumental remix of Outkast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmusik. From there we let Outkast rhyme and switch over to the album version before closing things out with Nas’ The World Is Yours. I’ve never been too high on Nas³, but catching this on Yo! MTV Raps made me order Illmatic from the Columbia Music Club, and I later picked up the vinyl. This is a great Pete Rock production, and the album is admittedly full of great tracks. I just feel BDP or Mos Def more for consciousness, and at the time of the release I was more into the aggression of Wu-Tang Clan. No apologies here.

That’s it for Part I. Coming up we’ll creep up the tempo ladder a little with great tracks rom Missy, Wu-Tang, Beasties, Dr. Dre, ODB, and more.