Run DMC - Crown Royal (2001)

It wasn't exactly a comeback given that Darryl McDaniels turns up on just three tracks, having regarded the project with scepticism; but it's a great album, regardless. Run was keen to remind us of the group's significance in rap history, particularly with respect to the whole rock-rap crossover deal which had pretty much begun with Run DMC - not just Walk This Way but their whole sound which was always heavy even in the absence of guitars. Thus we get guest slots and collaborations with Kid Rock, the bloke from Limp Bizkit and other rock-rap types unlikely to have scored points in the pages of The Source; also Method Man, Fat Joe, Nas and others, because Run DMC were integral to the evolution of rap as we know it, not just the Beastie Boys. It looks a lot like the old school getting down with the kids, at least until you listen to the thing.

Contrary to what one might expect, Crown Royal was never about old guys trying to stay relevant and even without guests, these tracks are as good as anything they've ever recorded. If Run's delivery remains rooted in the old school, it wasn't like he'd ceased to evolve and expand or had lost any of his powers. This is also true of the music which kept the faith as we'd recognise it while nevertheless moving with the times - at least as of 2001. It was a new album more than it was ever an exercise in smoking a pipe and looking back with a wrinkled smile.

Of the rock-rap numbers, the collaboration with Trump's fave homeboy, Kid Rock is the one which goes hard and blows even the strongest possible objections out of the water, but none of them are surplus to requirements, even though I don't have a fucking clue who or what Sugar Ray or Third Eye Blind may be. In the name of variety, more than half the album is regular hip-hop and so we get Queen's Day featuring local lads Nas and Prodigy, effectively passing the baton, I suppose. There are two you'll need to skip. Both feature Jermaine Dupri, and if It's Over is musically decent, the Jagged Edge collaboration is a waste of both time and its half-arsed Marvin Gaye impersonation. I'm sure Dupri must have done something to justify his reputation, or at least the fact of my having heard of the fucker, but I have no idea what it might be. He doesn't actually rap on It's Over, for example, instead preferring to explain the extent of his own popularity as quantified by how much he has in his savings bank, delivered in the usual whiny voice of wasps in a jam jar somehow as a tribute to Run DMC, the logic being when someone as amazing as what I am pays a compliment then you better believe it means something; and the cunt won't shut up. Every gap created by Run pausing to draw breath is filled with Dupri reminding us how wealthy he is or just saying yeeeah in case we've stopped thinking about him. Run rhymes about buying his girlfriend a Mercedes, and we hear Dupri croaking me too in the background just in case anyone had begun to doubt his financial standing.

It could have done with a bit more Darryl, but Crown Royal remains a classic despite requiring two judicious stabs of the skip function; and with rap's increased tendency to drift off into the realm of music for furries and anime twats, we really need to remember the originators and how music works best when it does what it should do. This one does what it should do very well.

We Can't Be Stopped (1998)

I gave up listening to rap fairly early on in its development. I had liked Grandmaster Flash, Whodini, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and those guys, but for some reason LL Cool J just seemed to represent a good idea taken too far in the wrong direction with all else following along like seagulls in the wake of a trawler. I can no longer remember why LL Cool J in particular should have represented my cut off point, but the whole enterprise just seemed to be getting too goofy, and I was tired of being asked to put my hands in the air and wave them as though viewing the act with absolute indifference, and that same fucking drum machine over and over...

De La Soul sounded interesting, although not enough to make me want to buy an album; and NWA sounded terrifying in a fairly interesting way, but by 1990 it seemed obvious that rap had become too wide and too complex to be understood at a glance by a relative outsider such as myself. Unfortunately this left me with very little fresh listening material as that with which I was more comfortable had, generally speaking, begun to turn to shit during the nineties with the refitting of proper music as a series of jangly consumer options. Where once we'd had Wire, Crass, Joy Division, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Bill Nelson or whoever - to name but five off the top of my head - now there was the Beautiful South, Oasis, Supergrass, Björk, the Levellers, the Boo Radleys, Primal Scream and a million other horrible box-ticking wankers all queueing up to provide the sort of mechanically reclaimed lifestyle soundtrack that shifted T-shirts and got crowds punching the air without sounding too dissonant when used to advertise car insurance. Suddenly it was okay to listen to ELO again, and I found myself increasingly driven into a corner desperately clutching a few albums by Foetus, Nocturnal Emissions, and the three other people in the world still doing something that didn't sound like the musical equivalent to an episode of My Family.

I needed a complete change, something as far removed from four white guys with guitars as possible. I didn't want to end up as one of those persons wistfully pulling a Simple Minds album from its sleeve and telling his guests I'm an eighties man. I wanted to be able to slap on a newly purchased record and find myself staring open-mouthed at the speakers wondering what the hell I was hearing; and much like the guy who sang the theme from Friends, rap was there for me. It probably helped that rap was what people at work listened to, not so much because they tried to bring me into the fold or bothered to lend me anything they thought I might like, just that they provided a precedent. I bought Foxy Brown's Chyna Doll album more or less on the grounds that it wasn't by the White Stripes - or the Shite Stripes as I call them hur hur hur - and looking at the cover in the store, I found it impossible to imagine what the thing would sound like.

It actually sounded pretty fucking great, and even better, it featured what I later came to recognise as a fairly typical quota of guest performers, others whose work I could chase up in my quest for aural stimulation; which led to a couple of CDs by Mia X, and in turn to whatever else I could find on the No Limit label.

No Limit were a revelation to me, a stable of New Orleans rappers sharing the same production team, and churning out disc after disc of stuff that wasn't really like anything I'd heard before, and all with these bizarre covers by Pen & Pixel graphics, sharp dressed photoshopped rap persons eating diamonds for breakfast cereal - designs perpetrated without concessions to taste or subtlety by people who probably didn't quite know what they were doing but still had one hell of a time doing it; and the records sounded like they were made in the same spirit, like the fruit of a journey that began with the words well, let's turn this thing on and see what the fuck happens.

We Can't Be Stopped dates roughly from the heyday of No Limit records and is reasonably representative - a uniquely varied line up of landmark rappers of whom at least three or four existed pretty much in stylistic fields of their own, notably Fiend and Mr. Serv-On; and the music is typically all over the shop, probably composed mostly in Cubase or some similar programme, disparate elements joyfully slapped together just to see how they'll sound, cheesy old Roland drum machines pinging away next to piano, brushed snares, pizzicato strings, and all sorts of things that just shouldn't be served on the same plate. One great thing about No Limit was that even when their Beats by the Pound production team were quite obviously responding to someone asking for a track that sounds like that song by so and so, the end result more often than not goes somewhere else entirely. There's an almost amateur feel, the outsider art of rap, but done with such enthusiasm that it can't help but sound weird and great and absolutely fresh - I mean fresh as in new, by the way, but the other meaning is fine too.

Sadly, it wasn't long after We Can't Be Stopped came out that Master P, No Limit CEO, made the grave mistake of listening to his critics and turned the label into a spent force more or less overnight, shedding most of the roster's talent in a doomed effort to keep up with the times and emulate those newer artists who had spent most of the nineties vainly trying to duplicate his success. Some of the artists here went on to better things - not least Fiend, the definitive bullfrog of rap and a personal all time favourite - but the golden age was over. It turned out some of them could be stopped, none of which changes that this collection still sounds great more than a decade later, still full of surprises. If this stuff hadn't come along at just the right time as evidence in support that there will always be new things under the sun providing you know where to look, my own listening habits would probably still be stuck back in 1989.