Blade - The Lion Goes from Strength to Strength (1993)

Blade should require no introduction, but then we live in a far from perfect world and it's been nearly thirty years since this album, fifteen since his most recent - unless there's been one which nobody told me about. It's not that he was the first rapper with a British passport, but he was in on the ground floor and maintained enduring visibility back before anyone took UK rap seriously on any kind of scale. He achieved some mainstream success with The Unknown recorded with the late Mark B, even landing an appearance on Top of the Pops, but this was his second album, the one which apparently remains his own personal favourite; which itself reveals him to be a good judge of his own work because it really is his best, at least so far as I'm concerned.

This is a CD reissue I'm listening to, but I can still recall the moment when I lowered the needle onto the first white vinyl disc of the original double, and I recall that moment because what comes out of the speaker is as astonishing as a kick up the arse - the adrenaline rush of organised noise, musical information overload somehow tamed to a funky as fuck beat duplicating the intensity of the Bomb Squad without simply copying the moves; and while we're on the subject of Public Enemy, Blade himself betrays the influence of - guessing here - both Chuck D and Rakim, but his own personality overpowers the delivery to the point that you couldn't really mistake him for anyone else.

As with much of Blade's work, the whole thing was pulled together by the man himself - recorded, pressed, distributed, everything, and the sleeve notes describe our man picking the pockets of teenagers in arcades to finance the release of his debut, arguing that they would only have spunked the money away on nothing. Accordingly you can really feel the graft that's gone into this one, fueled by fried chicken, Lucozade, and sleepless nights sweating over the beats and rhymes - gritty as New Cross, posture free, angry and funny, and refreshingly outspoken in terms of authority and our man's refusal to jump through the usual music biz hoops. Were it not for the fried chicken, The Lion Goes from Strength to Strength is one of the few rap albums which would have made sense on the Crass label, which is no bad thing.

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.

So Solid Crew - They Don't Know (2001)

This is another one that sort of passed me by at the time, being as it was another four years before I bothered getting internets, and most of my English rap dollars were spent on purchases based on whatever sounded interesting in Hip Hop Connection magazine and what I could find in the shops which didn't cost stupid money. I know I might have gone to clubs or kept an ear tuned to the pirates, but I had a life, and I was a slightly porky late thirties white bloke, and I wasn't about to start listening to Tim fucking Westwood, obviously. I heard this lot when they broke through onto whatever shit station to which the radio at work had been permatuned, and I stood holding the CD in Sainsbury's for a couple of minutes, but fifteen quid seemed a lot.

So Solid never really received much coverage in Hip Hop Connection, or at least not so much as they probably deserved. This was possibly because homegrown rap was then seen as Blade, Rodney P and a few others, great talents who had been at it for decades but who remained very much rooted in the tradition of British rap as something that sounds a bit like whatever DJ Premier was doing in 1992. So Solid Crew didn't really have anything to do with this tradition, and worse still, they were garage MCs. Garage as it stood at the turn of the century had come a long way from house roots, and at least in England seemed to be a weird hybrid of dancehall, drum and bass, and whatever else happened to be laying around at the time. Garage MCs were, generally speaking, mostly utter shite - usually whoever had put the track together would just ask his milkman to drop a few verses, usually comprising the name of artist and track title as written on the label of the record read out loud in a sort of Tim Westwood voice over and over for a few minutes, as with Pied Piper & Unknown MC - who was probably wise to remain unknown:

We're Pied Piper & Unknown MC,
Yes, Pied Piper & Unknown MC.
He's Pied Piper & I'm Unknown MC.
That name again is Pied Piper & Unknown MC.

Brilliant. Anyway, So Solid were thankfully an entirely different kettle of more lyrical and slightly angrier fish, and, if nothing else, at least deserve credit for selling truckloads of English rap by persons who could properly hold a verse together without it sounding like they were angling for a support slot on De La Soul's fiftieth reunion tour. Furthermore, there's probably a case to be made for So Solid having paved the way for the likes of Roll Deep and other grimier types, at least in terms of showing you could put this stuff out and be heard beyond the pirate stations.

Musically, there's not much going on, mostly just mains hum bass and those weird skittery beats with the occasional bit of a dentist's waiting room melody for garnish; but they do a hell of a lot with very few ingredients, creating an immersive experience - if that doesn't sound too far up my own arse - not unlike hearing this stuff on a pirate station without quite knowing what it is. Thankfully, it's not only a million miles from all that Artful Dodger pop wank, but is actually quite hard to pin down in terms of strongly resembling anything else, before or since. My only real criticism is that Megaman sounds like an eighties children's cartoon character, aside from which, I'm genuinely surprised at how good this is, and how fresh it still sounds.