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.

Eric B & Rakim - Paid In Full (1986)

 

I've no idea why it's taken me more than three decades to get hold of this. I bought the singles as they came out but, for some reason, not the album and - stranger still - only really noticed this as a massive oversight about a month ago, so here we are.

Paid In Full still sounds fresh as fuck in 2021 and remains unmistakably a major contender for one of those greatest rap album of all time lists. You can still hear the old school lineage drawn out from the Furious Five and others - all the sing-songy nursery rhyme acts - alongside the birth of modern rap, or what was modern rap before the advent of Lil Yachty and all those guys whom I suppose we should count just in case one of the under-twenties reads this and is struck down by low self-esteem. Yet rather than representing an intermediary point, Paid In Full seems to have become a sort of perfect timeless form existing at the exact temporospatial epicentre of all rap, which is why it doesn't seem to have dated and remains seemingly unique, or at least not quite like anything before or since.

The music and beats are minimal, the sort of thing which could have been recorded pretty much live, and maybe were for all I know; yet the looped beats, samples, cutting and scratching fills the space in ways which didn't often happen back in 1986, from what little I recall from reverb heavy beatbox records which always sounded as though they couldn't think of anything else to add. Rakim may have been superceded on the purely technical level of vocal acrobatics, but few have sounded so confident, so effortless, or so compelling. Sexual swearwords were still to be invented, so we don't even have so much as a bitch or a shit on this record, and Rakim spends plenty of time talking about his own lyricism and comes out of it still sounding hard as fuck without resorting to any of the traditional posturing - either gun toting or piously worthy.

Strangely, as a sort of perfect rap album in the Platonic sense - if that isn't so far up my own rear end that the words become illegible - Paid In Full improves everything in its vicinity like a nurturing, almost solar force reconnecting the listener to all the fundamental elements which made rap so great in the first place - the robot beats combined with the raw funk. I listened to one of the old Ma$e albums in the wake of this and even that sounded pretty decent.

Does it really get any better than Paid In Full?

I don't know.

I just don't know.