London Posse - Gangster Chronicle (1990)

This one passed me by at the time, but wasn't alone in that respect. Homegrown UK rap was still trying to work out the details of its own relationship to the mainstream, turning up on house tunes or sounding vaguely like Chuck D in the lower reaches of the charts to the amusement of a million generally clueless indie fucks on the grounds that rap music is from America innit, which was never really the most coherent of objections. London Posse weren't the first to rap without American affectations but were arguably the first to truly sound like their own thing, and thus our thing from an English perspective. Of course, they took a lot from Jamaican culture, it being their culture - dancehall, ragga, the toasting and so on - which, unlike the profound influence of Public Enemy on both Blade and Hijack - was something so firmly ingrained in the streets of London as to have wormed its way into the DNA of the city itself.

Gangster Chronicle is therefore justifiably remembered as a classic, one of the first of its kind, and yet was laid down with such raw enthusiasm for its own exploratory spirit that we still haven't reached the sell by date, and it sounds as fresh in 2020 as it did three decades before - or at least it does to me. Perhaps through finding itself needing to shout so much louder for the attention, UK rap can generally be characterised as having been executed to a higher standard than transatlantic equivalents, at least in so much as that the average UK MC usually makes the average US dude sound like a bit of an idiot; and so it was for Rodney P and Bionic, sharp as fuck, funny with it, and paying homage to no-one but themselves. Musically we're drawing from dancehall with skanking rhythms and bluebeat horns dominating the album, while doing something new and different back at the birth of sampling, something which no longer sounded like a robot and which, it might be argued, was one of the first truly successful examples of sampling woven into something distinctly organic. You can hear the intersection of all sorts of disparate musical strands meeting on this one disc, things which came from house or which would eventually turn into drum and bass - everything is here.

Being of a certain vintage, it's probably inevitable that this album conjures a certain ambience for me - specifically New Cross, London, SE14 circa. 1990, and more specifically the stretch of road between the bus garage and New Cross Gate tube station, stinking and heaving with vehicles under a hot summer sun. So I wasn't there at the time - because I was actually just down the road in Lewisham and probably listening to Front 242 - but if I had been I know it would have felt and sounded like this; and should the thrust of my three paragraph brainfart remain ambiguous, I'm trying to say that Gangster Chronicle is a powerful album which has lost none of its fire over the years.