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Classic Hip Hop Music

The Connoisseur | MI | 04/14/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is just Hip Hop Music in its pure form and at its best. I definitely recommend it to the average Hip Hop listener"

Truly Brilliant.

M. Worrell | Chicago USA | 02/09/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I'm white. I grew up in a small town out in the sticks. At one time in that town there was one gas station, one restaurant (actually, it was a Dairy Queen), one grocery store, one hardware, and THREE bait shops. We had an absolutely huge school district with some kids living 20 miles away from each other, yet there was only one black student in my graduating class and even that was unusual.



When I was probably a sophomore in high school, I was scanning through the radio stations late at night and ran across a black station broadcasting out of Cleveland. They were playing ten and fifteen minute long stretches of music put together by DJs from any number of rap records, to be played in clubs. This was the first time I'd ever heard rap music (yes, I'd heard "Rapture" by Blondie... doesn't count), and I was blown away by it. I started listening every night, taping the mixes and bringing them to school. I got to know some of the artists by their raps... Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde, Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash. You couldn't buy the stuff anywhere near me, that I knew of.



It really opened up a new world to me... inner city youth culture, breakdancing, "bombing" trains, competing with each other. The Cleveland DJs who made the mixes that I listened to on the radio were also competing with each other, trying to come up with the best stuff and talking trash about each other in the studio. It was unlike anything I had heard before... and arrestingly creative. That's probably what I liked most about it.



The first complete rap album I ever got my hands on was Run D.M.C.'s debut, which I was partially familiar with from the club mixes... although the mixes played records over top of one another, shuffled with all kinds of other songs, sometimes repeating just a snippet of what was a great song. A friend had borrowed the cassette, and in turn let me borrow it. It was about this time that rap was really becoming popular, with artists like Whodini and the Fat Boys, but Run D.M.C. seemed a lot more developed. Their trademark trading off of the vocal parts made already strong songs even better.



My favorites to this day are "Hard Times" and "Wake Up", but virtually every track is great. "Rock Box" isn't one of my personal picks, but it's noteworthy for its use of hard rock guitar. "It's Like That" has fantastic lyrics ("You should've gone to school, you could've learned a trade, but you laid in bed where the bums have laid, now all the time you're crying that you're underpaid... It's like that and that's the way it is").



The thing that strikes me about the music now is that it was clever and funny, and the message was positive. Not because Congress passed a law saying it had to be, not because parents and parental advocates demanded it, but because it was made by sincerely positive people who wanted to make things better. A few years later the genre would get a lot more commercial, complex, and (sadly) profane. The music on this album is minimalist by comparison, but to me it seems far more authentic and purposeful."