Hip Hop Appreciation Week Pt 2

Mixtape 2 of 5 : Golden Age

The second lot of ten songs on my list covers rap's so-called Golden Age with artists like Run DMC and the Beastie Boys making a massive impact on the world stage.

• MC Shy D - Rap Will Never Die : Having already released this song, Shy D rerecorded and rewrote it to cover the history of the genre; with shout outs to Kool Herc, Arika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and just about every notable artist all the way to Run DMC. This was an anthem to me. All I have for this remixed version is an mp3 I made from a tape off the radio in 1987.
  

• Run DMC - Walk This Way : When my best friend from Primary School came back from Bali in the summer of 1985/86, he gave me a tape and told me it was 'breakdance' music. At the time, B-Boying was deader than the Charleston so I scoffed. That tape was Raising Hell. Within months, Walk This Way was the biggest Hip Hop hit ever, at the time, and remained so for quite some time afterwards. Rap now had true sway with the industry.

• Beastie Boys - The New Style : Def Jam's stab at the white boy market started life as a trio of 'beer-drinking, breath-stinking' spoiled brat middle-class kids from Brooklyn. Mixing rock guitar with beats and cuts the way Run DMC had so successfully with Aerosmith, the Beastie Boys' debut Licensed To Ill was a Billboard #1 hit.

• Eric B & Rakim - I Ain't No Joke - The smooth and serious baritone of Rakim Allah and the masterful mixing of James Brown soul and Hip Hop's hardest beats by Eric B set a bar for rap albums on Paid In Full that is rarely matched. I must have played my dubbed copy from imported vinyl as a 15 year old a million times. I purchased the CD as soon as it made it here, but rap got no love from Perth in 1987. I can still play this album from start to finish and then play it again. Absolute masterpiece and a treasure of the genre.

• Public Enemy - Bring The Noise : With Paid In Full, PE's debut Yo! Bum Rush the Show was like a twin talisman of everything I loved about rap. But Bum Rush sounded like PE had been mucking around when It Takes a Nation of Millions dropped. "Too black, too strong." With Nation, Chuck, Flav, Griff and the S1Ws really brung the noise.

• Ice-T - High Rollers : When Ice-T tells you he is the OG, you better freakin' believe it. I hadn't even heard Six in the Mornin' from Ice's debut Rhyme Pays when I first bought Power, but this for me is where gangster rhymes began; released before Straight Outta Compton dropped - and Rhyme Pays had already done it. Good use of sampled sounds and beats and Ice's hardcore intensity with a moral make this my favourite Ice-T track.

• NWA - Fuck Tha Police : Oh didn't we like to blast this one from our cars on P plates in 1989. This was violence and disrespect for the fun of it - just the way adolescent boys like it. There's a direct line from NWA to Big and Pac and 50 and Jah Rule et al. And of course, without Dre, rap would be a whole different beast by now.

• The Stop The Violence Movement - Self Destruction : Hip Hop and rap's Live Aid. Iconic artists from PE to Heavy D got together and decided to make a song about gang violence. This was rappers with a conscience trying to do something positive amidst the cries from the media and government that rap was violent. Forever all I could get of this song was a recording from the radio (Perth's first rap show Scratch FM on 100FM Fremantle) I have since purchased it online and recently bought the 12" vinyl.

• De La Soul - Say No Go : Hall and Oates in a rap song about drugs and poverty. How did that work so well?! Prince Paul you are a genius. This is more positive attitude from rap with Native Tongues members De La Soul releasing the ever-brilliant 3 Feet High and Rising (a cassette for which I paid $50 to import when it was released in 1989).

• Salt-n-Pepa - Push It : At this stage in my life as a head, I wasn't impressed with Salt-n-Pepa. They were girls, for a start and not Roxanne Shante, and everyone seemed to love this song - especially people who claimed to hate rap. I had already heard The Showstopper which was simply a dis to Doug E Fresh's The Show and that was the other reason I disliked them. But I have grown to enjoy their early work, particularly My Mic Sounds Nice

So that's another 10. I really would like to post the mixtapes so anyone bothering to read this can hear what I'm rambling about. I wish I had hosted space; but alas...

See you for part 3 soon.