Whodini - Greatest Hits (1992)

Being somewhere in the vicinity of a million years old, I've often found myself caught out and bewildered by use of the term old school when referring to rap, because these days old school means some multicoloured foetus who had a hit ringtone six months ago - you know, that thing which was just three minutes of handclap and some dude slurring meaningless gang gibberish, my balls be bigger than yo mama's 'hoooooood, or similar, over and over and 'hood pronounced with seven Os just as Tupac would have wanted it. Whodini, on the other hand, were proper old school dating back from even before they invented swearing and had to label rap music with Tipper stickers.

Once again, I'm following up a lead from about thirty years ago, one of those things I taped but apparently couldn't afford to buy whilst gaps remained to be filled in my Gary Numan collection. I had a look on Discogs but old rap CDs cost a fucking fortune now, or at least more than I'm willing to pay, leaving me with the option of either vinyl or greatest hits collections, and I've reached the point where I can't actually fit any more vinyl albums on the designated shelving. Whodini's Greatest Hits doesn't seem to contain Rap Machine, but never mind. It's close enough.

Whodini still exist and don't seem to have quite fallen off the edge of the map, but it's probably safe to assume the comeback would have happened by now if it was going to happen. Nevertheless, I'd say this stuff has been overlooked more than should have been the case, which is unfortunately the nature of the rap biz.

Whodini date from an era prior to anyone giving a shit about the greatest lyricist of all time, or conforming to some other guy's version of keeping it real, or downwardly mobile credentials. They got the fuck on with it, and it doesn't matter that their old school nursery rhyme cadence has been superseded by bigger sellers because it still delivers the goods. Nothing dates so quickly as a new idea, depending on the motivation, particularly if it has nothing going for it beyond being a new idea. Whodini did it for the right reasons and consequently somehow still sound as fresh as fuck after all these decades. The beats were programmed at the height of electro back when those squeaky clean Yamaha snare samples still seemed futuristic, and where their contemporaries may now sound slightly archaic and obvious, the raw energy and enthusiasm that went into this stuff has kept it alive.

Young guns may chortle at the absence of a parental advisory warning, or these clean cut men who clearly brushed their teeth every night before bed, but Magic's Wand and Haunted House of Rock - to name but two of the fourteen mammoth cuts assembled within - still blow most of the competition out of the water. In rap terms, we really need to start moving beyond the idea that nothing much happened before Run DMC.