The Best of Schoolly D (1990)

 

I assume we all remember Schoolly D as the guy generally credited with inventing gangsta rap, and while there's a thin line to be drawn because nobody could possibly mistake The Message - to name but one - for Oops Upside Your Head, it's doubtful that NWA, Compton's Most Wanted, Ice-T and others would have sounded quite as they did without the influence of this guy, both in subject matter and its delivery; but as with almost everything, history gets in the way meaning gangsta rap has become a misleading description at best. Even if he's pulling a face, these records are mainly about good times with a liberal seasoning of reality, simply meaning that gangs, shags, and getting off one's tits on illegal substances are an inevitable part of the equation - which is refreshing in the wake of all those rap records about how you could go to college, or at least help an old lady across the road and refrain from being such a Negative Neddy*. Positivity doesn't have to be an inherently bad thing, but we're drowning in it right now and it doesn't seem to be helping.

In addition to being a whole shitload more fun than you may have been led to believe through overexposure to the 50 Cent back catalogue, these singles (plus a couple of early album tracks) may not sound quite as expected. Hip-hop moves on like no other genre, sonically speaking, filling as it goes an ever expanding circus tent with the latest incarnations of old school, as though all that went before is known, done, all over, and at best just a helpful footnote to where we are now. The twelve tracks included here are mostly just a guy rapping over a drum machine with scratching - grooves not tunes, and not even much in the way of sampling. It's minimal when you look at the credits, but it sure doesn't sound that way. I still vividly remember getting to piss about with my first proper eighties drum machine - a Yamaha RX15 owned by Steve McGarrigle, and one of the first to use samples. It seemed amazing what you could do with the thing, and even more amazing what came out of the speakers despite such memories having since been tarnished by all the shitty futuristic haircut acts of the decade hammering that thing into the ground. The difference is that whatever they're using on this stuff - and it's something very similar - still sounds as powerful and fresh and exciting as I remember, like the world's funkiest bailiff kicking in your front door - somehow in a good way. I suspect this may be thanks to DJ Code Money who additionally fills the remaining space with a tapestry of the finest scratching you'll hear, riffs, parps, squeaks, burps and scribbles forming a powerfully atmospheric embellishment to the microphone without ever quite committing to a tune. It's rare to hear music which seems to do so little and yet sounds so fucking massive that it would kill you in an instant if it fell on you.

Time for a giant fuck-off sized bronze statue of the man in one of those parks, I'd say, should anyone from Philadelphia city council happen to be reading.

*: Turn that Frown Upside Down, You Miserable Fucker by Afrika Bambaataa & Positive Life Tabernacle being one example of the subgenre that I've just made up.

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.

Blank Banshee - Blank Banshee 0 (2012)

A couple of months ago, someone mentioned vapourwave to me, specifically wondering aloud whether it should be considered post-music in the sense of Lady Gaga and other ringtone artistes. Because I'm fat and fifty, and because I couldn't give a shit about computer games, incomprehensible Japanese cartoons, Instagram, most social media, or young people in general, I was embarrassed to admit I'd never heard of him, or it, or whatever gramophone records they may have recently sent scurrying to the top of the hit parade, there to dislodge Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. I was embarrassed because it turns out the thing had been around for at least five years without my having been aware of it even as a name.

Okay, so vapourwave was not only old news but also massive in context of its own self-contained microcosm of 4Chan types and people who post video clips of themselves talking about computer games on YouTube; so there's no reason why I should have heard of it, I suppose. Anyway, Wikipedia has this to say:

Vapourwave is a music genre and art movement that emerged in the early 2010s and spread over the next half of the decade among various internet communities. It is characterised by a nostalgic or surrealist fascination with retro cultural aesthetics (typically that of the late eighties and early nineties), entertainment technology, consumer culture and advertising, and styles of corporate and popular music such as lounge, smooth jazz and elevator music. Sampling is prevalent within the genre, with samples often pitched, layered or altered, sometimes in a classic chopped and screwed style. Central to the style is often a satirical but not necessarily critical preoccupation with consumer capitalism, popular culture, and new-age tropes.

I've also seen it claimed that vapourwave is over, and Blank Banshee is actually seapunk, but I don't care. I'm fifty. Fuck off.

Anyway, it's a file sharing, downloady thing, and I'm yet to sign up with the whole download culture because I much prefer physical objects and I've never owned an iPod - or equivalent device - that worked for longer than three months at a time; and like I say, I'm fat and fifty.

I had a root around on YouTube, it being a source of numerous vapourwave albums uploaded in their entirety. Most of what I heard sounded sort of interesting, if not startlingly unlike anything else I've ever encountered. As a genre it seemed to be making a virtue out of samples of unusually bland material - ringtones, game noises, television station idents, the little tune your computer plays when you boot it up. Some of it was kind of irritating, but some of it seemed to have something, and of all the stuff I browsed, Blank Banshee seemed to have enough of something to warrant a violation of my own personal code; so I threw dollars at the bandcamp page and bagged me some downloads, then immediately burned them to CDR so I could give them a proper listen.

Blank Banshee is supposedly a Canadian by name of Patrick Driscoll, beyond which I know nothing but for the music itself, which I guess is deliberate. It sounds very much like music composed entirely on audio editing software using samples of the general type described, so for the most part there's a weirdly smooth quality which actually makes me think of the blandly utopian seaside resort described by J.G. Ballard in Vermilion Sands. Some of it has the monged-out ambience of new-age motivational tapes, and is almost certainly sampled from something in that direction. Yet, as promised by the hype, there's something weirdly fascinating by this overpowering wash of airbrushed perfection, as though it's laid on so thick it becomes something new.

On the other hand, the music might not work so well were it purely as I've described, that also being more or less how Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus sounds to me, and which is why I didn't bother downloading it despite it apparently being the Never Mind the Bollocks of vapourwave. Blank Banshee works by taking the form somewhere else, bringing in material lifted from the crunkier end of southern rap - notably those crunchy handclaps and finger clicks - and this influence seems also to mold the music into something significantly funkier than whoever it was nicked from - possibly excepting Flash's The Message which is the only sample I've been able to identify. Regardless of sources, Blank Banshee 0 ends up as something new in its own right - nothing longer than your average television commercial and adding up to just over half an hour of what feels like a continuous piece, and one which definitely exerts a strange influence on the place you're in, cerebrally speaking. It invokes in passing certain quieter moments of Nine Inch Nails, Anne Dudley's Art of Noise, and Three-6-Mafia, but also a fairly substantial dose of Yellow Magic Orchestra.

I'm still not a fan of downloads, but this cost me a dollar and is pretty darned wonderful; and more than anything it's really nice to know that in terms of new things, music isn't quite over. This kind of thing may even be the first wave of whatever happens next.

Blank Banshee 1 from 2014 is also fucking great by the way, and apparently he has a new one out even as I write this.

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.