Pubatube

Yeah, I reckon I'm just gonna post the clip of Mary J. Blige and Grand Puba doing What's The 411 live on Yo! MTV Raps back in 1992 up on here once a year since it was only THE BESTEST YO! SPOT EVER!!!!!!!!! :



This ticks every box for a live tv performance - it enhances the song (the playfulness of the rendition with all the ad-libbing), it has sexiness (Mary), swag (Puba), gear (Puba's POLO Alpine rugby; Mary in Cross Colors from head-to-thigh), a couple of nerdout moments (Stud Dougie in the flesh; a young Puffy chillin' at the back on the left), and it includes a great semi-dance moment by one of the performers (Puba at 1:20 - 1:22), but what really elevates this above every other great YO! performance is that Mary manages to pull off a nose-stud without looking like a Riot Grrrl and Puba somehow manages to wear jean-shorts without succumbing to ECW wrestler syndrome.

Not quite as good as this, but still very much appreciated in the thank-fuck-MTV-aren't-having-their-shit-promptly-removed-anymore stakes is Puba's YO! performance of 360° (What Goes Around); a good companion to not only the What's the 411 clip but also the Puba doing 360° (What Goes Around) on Living Color video The Meaning Of Dope (R.I.P?) posted :



The real reason to be excited about MTV not having their content deleted from Youtube these days, though, is that the Roc-A-Fella hosted freestyle battle from 2003 with Blind Fury is finally back up on there :





"You need to do what LaLa did, homie, and get yourself a Clue" is still a top 5 punchline of the noughties (or, at least, the best Akinyele line which Ak' didn't actually spit), and although Jay-Z is often credited with shutting Joe Budden's career down when he rhymed over Pump It Up on his Reebok mixtape that time, it's the gawd with the third eye vision who claimed Budden's scalp when he freestyled over Focus in the last battle against Swann AKA a genetic hybrid of Questlove, Prop Joe from The Wire & Robert Smith from The Cure's wardrobe. "Salutations..."

Generic XXL Freshmen post

‘Thou Shalt Make A Post Commenting On The XXL Freshman Cover Where Thou Complains That _____ Isn't On It’ is now the 2nd most salient Rap Blogger Commandment of 2011 behind ‘Thou Shalt Fire Shots At Eskay’, and, as with previous Freshmen covers, half the rappers on the 2011 edition have been releasing music since 2005 which makes them less freshmen and more 25 year olds playing teenagers in a John Hughes flick. So, since I haven't seen anybody else tsk-tsking his exclusion yet, here's my entry into the cavalcade of today's XXL Freshmen blog posts where I ask where in the hell was $tarlito/All $tar since he had a regional hit in 2006 like so many other Freshmen luminaries over the years and he droped 2 of the best projects of 2010 in Renaissance Gangster and $tarlito's Way 3 : Life Insurance :

$tarlito - Until Then (2010)



Free At Last came out as precursor 'tape to $tarlito's Way 3 and where the latter worked as a legitimate album, the former was a proper rap mixtape in that it was just a bunch of crappy studio scraps, a few freestyles, and 2 joints of 'lito at his wistful best with this and Last Song. The difference between $tarlito and a lot of the other current crop of southern blog darlings is that he actually possesses a personality, and whilst the country-rap 2.0 of the rappers he often gets lumped in with has now become a cul-de-sac of UGK, 8Ball & MJG, and Goodie Mob rehashes, he uses records like Underground Legend by Lil' Flip and T.I's Trap Muzik as a vague blueprint, rather than a crutch. It obviously also doesn't hurt that he's pretty great rapper with a distinctive flow who can weave these fairly intricate rhyme-patterns which still somehow sound like streams-of-consciousness, either, but I guess he just doesn't look similar enough to a melted Big Momma's House fat-suit of Jadakiss to warrant inclusion.

BONUS SORTA RELATED BEATS :

Young Buck ft. The Outlawz - Lord Have Mercy (2009)



This is so much better than a Young Buck & The Outlawz song from 2009 should ever have the right to be, and even though I've kinda grown to love all the cliches about The Outlawz that I used to hate about them, it's near impossible to listen to this and not find yourself thinking : "oh man, why didn't Burn One save this beat for $tarlito's Renaissance Gangster?"

Duff McKeakgan

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Who got the State Props?

Can't say that I'm particularly enthusiastic about a new Dipset album given that Salute amounted to little more than a bunch of slightly modified lines from other songs over cacophonous Gabba by DJ Nosferatu, a Hot Boy$ reunion album at this point in time would probably feature Drake and Tyga taking the places of B.G and Turk so it's better it never comes to fruition, and the Mob Figaz seem a little too fractured to be able to congregate together for a full project as a unit currently; but now Peedi is out of prison I wouldn't say no to a third State Property album, or even an official mixtape in the vein of Beanie's Public Enemy # 1 if it featured some posse cuts like this much underrated single from 2009 :

Young Chris ft. Freeway & Beanie Sigel - Last 2 (2009)



Chris and Free trading bars and finishing each other's lines like Run Dmc or Juve' & B.G over a beat which appears to include such random noises as the teleport beams in Battle Beyond The Stars and the sound that the smoke monster from Lost made whenever it appeared would be good enough as it is, so Beanie arriving with one of those OTT violent verses that've been his trademark on almost every State Prop joint over the past 3 years (Oceans Seven, Live In Effect, Cyphr which somehow made Wale sound hardbody, and Ready For War) is akin to finding a hot librarian chick with added slut tendencies, and the song is so good that it can even survive the kiss of death that is someone using the axiom ‘this is real hip hop!’ on it. So why was didn't this shit make much of a ripple? Because the news that Beanie and State Property were throwing a strop because Jay-Z was ignoring them completely overshadowed any of the music they dropped that year (also see : The Ghetto by Beanie, the sort of song he does so much better than anyone else presently active on the east coast and as close as he's come to following up Feel It In The Air) and nobody could find a full version of this at the time.

After the quality of production they can command nowadays, the prevailing worry with a new State Prop' album is that it could end up as an extended stockpile of butthurt disses about Jay-Z defriending Young Chris on Facebook or not sending Freeway an Xmas card, and it'd be sad to see Beanie go the way of Jayo Felony or 2001 - 2006 era Prodigy since embroiling one's self in combat with Jay-Z seems to be the rap equivalent of a visit to the Overlook Hotel (built on the blood of forefathers like Jaz-O, it turns men into maniacs and forever submerges them in its evil); but it's possible that this tactic could work in their favour since Peedi got jokes about Jay and most of Beans' verses are about torturing some unspecified nemesis of his anyway so it might as well be the camel.

Greatest movie scenes ever # 37

Poor Jack - he made a fortune off Joker merchandise bearing his image following Batman, and that line from A Few Good Men found itself reaching "you talkin' to me?" levels of quotability in the nineties, but neither triumph could ameliorate the wounds of his Danny DeVito directed/David Mamet written Jimmy Hoffa biopic from 1992 tanking commercially and receiving a couple of Razzie nominations in 1993 when that was his one great picture of the decade which featured his best performance since The Shining, particularly when he was zinging the then-attorney general Bobby Kennedy with claims that he was the Fredo to John's Michael and accusing the entire Kennedy family of being little more than a "bunch of rum-runners" :



I'm not gonna spoil the exact ending of the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, but, regrettably, it doesn't conclude with a sequence based on the possibly total bullshit theory that Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski and four mafia jobbers snatched Hoffa up from the Machus Red Fox parking lot, killed him by stabbing him in the head with a hunting knife, and disposed of his body by putting it into a barrel, placing it into the trunk a Toyota which was compacted with numerous other cars, and then shipped back to Japan as scrap metal. Vincent D'Onofrio would've made a good Kuklinski and employing the likes of Frank Vincent and Frank Sivero as stereotypical mobster stooges has never hurt any movie.

The magic number # 2

^^^ This fucken' guy, eh? The only way to cleanse one's mind of what Cee-Lo has become (a castrated Solomon Burke knocking Xmas albums of Amy Winehouse and Paloma Faith cover versions) is to go in hard with ATLanta-rap all day today, so throw on Soul Food and Still Standing to remind yourself of happier times, break out the Triflin's Da Word tape by Triflin' Pac and T.I's Trap Muzik, reminisce on that golden-era of those few months back in 2006 when the Laffy Taffy dance was the prevailing goal celebration of fútbollers and footballers alike, and join with me in a celebration of 3 slept-on Dungeon Fam' related songs as we ponder the identity of the ATL rapper who "got caught in the Range Rover with the boy" :

Bubba Sparxxx - Disappear (2003)



Since it's unlikely America's black citizens will ever receive reperations for slavery, at least its most powerful record producers/label figureheads like Dr Dre and Timbaland can humiliate their white employees by forcing them to bleach their hair and frolic with farmyard animals in pig shit as mild forms of retribution. Could it be that Timbo completely mishandling the way Bubba Sparxxx's Deliverance album was promoted also chalked up another gold-star for black power at the expense of a cracka-ass-cracka, because that's the only conceivable theory I can come up with for the perplexing choice of singles from Bubba's sophomore effort, and why Disappear, apparently originally intended as the album's first single, ended up as a European-only bonus track here and a promo 12"-only cut stateside when it sees Bubba handling one of Timmy's most jittery productions with a flow that's measured yet still dexterous enough to navigate its antsy, almost JB's level rhythms.

Rock D The Legend ft. Big Boi - DDT (That Hoe) (2007)



The problem with a lot of rap songs which make specific reference to wrestling in their titles is that they'll then utilise the subject incidentally in the song itself; Ric Flair by Cam & Vado, for example, only features Vado rhyming Flair with pair and doing a WOOOOOOOO! during the chorus and thus misses out on the opportunity of Cam wearing a white wig in the video, likening the classic Dipset lineup to the 4 Horsemen, or bragging that his Air Force One IDs cost more than his enemies houses. This Halloween theme-sampling ATL dance record which came out during the peak of the Crank Dat trend by Purple Ribbon weed carrier Rock D (mostly notable for appearing on Kryptonite) and the P.R boss Big Boi, however, helps redress the balance somewhat since it includes acknowledgments of Hogan, Ricky Steamboat, and coming off the top-rope. Tragically, it didn't become a hit or inspire a whole wrestling-inspired-trend of answer-versions throughout ATLanta, which means we were robbed of Scott Hall (Dat Hoe) by Young Dro or Stone Cold Stun (Dat Hoe) by Fabo ever existing when the latter could've been blessed with a looped video of that time Austin stunned Stephanie McMahon.

CunninLynguists ft. Khujo & Killer Mike - Georgia remix (2009)



There are numerous reasons to detest the whole 4 elementz of hip hop philosophy - the sight of grown men "battling" by gurning as they roll around on the floor together aping moves they saw Frosty Freeze do in Style Wars, and how it's become slightly embarrassing to admit to enjoying a once-innocent pasttime like shopping for records because of Norwegian backpacker vinyl purists and irritating internet presences like Wicked22 being the two most obvious examples - but if there's one positive we can take from a concept created by Charlie Ahearn and relentlessly pushed by various members of the ageing Bronx cartel as their pension plan then it's the ethos Afrika Bambaataa had of searching out certified bangers from the most unlikely of artists, and never has this practice been more apparent than when a couple of palookas like the CunninLynguists finally dropped a genuinely great song a couple of years back with this remix which thankfully declines to let either the black guy or the whiney white douchebag who magically appears with tall tales of how CunninLynguists songs helped cure the worldwide Foot-And-Mouth disease outbreak of 2001 whenever his name is mentioned online rap on it like they did on the well-intentioned but mawkish original. When CL have roped Dungeon Family members in on their songs previously the results have always sounded a little too 3 Freaks for my liking (as in, a white backpacker producer's idea of what a distinct regional rap song should sound like rather than what a real one actually sounds like), but this has the feel of one of Witchdoctor's more reflective cuts and my only quibble with it would be that the good 'doctor isn't present here. Yo, if I ask what song this samples does that mean I run the risk of DJ Kno turning up here to patronise me because I've never had the chance to rock village fête stages in Antwerp and Utrecht?

Martorial elegance # 43

MC Serch attempting The Crane in the video for that Kurious Benetton joint he was on with DOOM a couple of years back; his only worthwhile contribution to the song.

Back in the late nineties the gentlemen's fashion magazine Draper's Records proposed that the reason men's denim sales in the U.K had slumped to an all-time low was because of "the Jeremy Clarkson effect". It's an immensely plausible hypothesis, but it doesn't explain why the effect didn't spread to the 2 countries where denim is king when Top Gear is the highest rated show on the BBC's flagship channels in America and Japan, or why the equally atrocious Richard Hammond & James May visage of bootcut jeans with a brown leather jacket then became the default casual look of 97% of men over the age of 35 throughout the last decade.

Here at The Martorialist we spend at least 3 minutes per waking hour formulating theories about the effect celebrities in appalling jeans have on the tastes of the general public, and today we've come to a conclusion on the origins of sagged pants and it has nothing to do with 2 Live Crew album covers, street looks derived from the lack of belts in prison, or skaters buying their pants two or three sizes up to act as protection against injuries; the act of wearing one's slacks drooped below one's waistline, we proffer, was actually borne out of the universal horror teenagers experienced in 1989 when they flocked to see The Karate Kid 3 and laid their eyes on the then slightly portly Ralph Macchio making his jeans look all Jeremy Clarksoned out and thought "Christ on a pogo-stick, let's try to look as far from that as is sartorially possible" :



And there, in a pair of ill-fitting denim, is a lesson for you on how cruel, fickle, and ironic the worlds of both fashion and cinema are, given that Ralph had outswagged the rest of the male cast in The Outsiders as Johnny Cade by pulling off what's arguably the greatest Canadian Tuxedo in celluloid history back in 1983, yet still found himself as a proto-Kenny Powers figure for denim dystopia a mere 6 years later. Damn, Daniel son. To his credit, Karate Kid 3 saw Ralph still posessing aspirations of James Dean with his red Harrington jacket ala Jim Stark, but fate was conspiring against him on multiple levels by this point and the movie's wardrobe department could only come up with a cheap replica rather than a real Baracuta G9. Save for My Cousin Vinny, Ralph's movie career never recovered from such indignity and it shadowed the downfall of Sensei John Kreese and the Cobra Kai until regular tv parts acted as a sort've televisual Terry Silver.

BONUS BEATS :

Let's cast our minds back to the days when Serch was a tad more athletic :

3rd Bass - Wordz Of Wisdom (1989)



Yo, you know who's to blame for Serch's achingly solemn delivery on that aforementioned Kurious & DOOM joint? You dudes who've been calling him thee most exalted potentate of whiggatry on the internet for the last 15 years or so, that's who. Even if you've never been partial to Serch's brand of pre-Rappaport whiteness, you have to admit that the enthusiastic Serch of yore is far preferable to the earnest Serch on that song, and I'm sure you'd also concur that in 2011 it's about time someone leaked that original version of Serch's Back To The Grill Again with Akinyele on it which was mentioned in the Ego Trip book back in 1999.

Time! The corrector when our judgments err

E-40, San Quinn, B-Legit, & Richie Rich - Timin' (2002)
Before the classic Mac Dre posse cut Hustle used the Grindin' drums, there was this semi-official Bay Area remake of the song recorded especially for the 106 KMEL Jamz radio show where these 4 California bros all went sav' over the Grindin' instrumental and interpolated the original's chorus into an epode for the importance of gentlemen's timepieces around various neighbourhoods in Oakland and San Francisco.

On the downside, this makes me curse that '40 wasn't a recipient of a Neptunes beat during their 1999 - 2003 epoch or even something from a few years later like 10 Lil' Crips which would've sounded right at home on the first half of My Ghetto Report Card; on the bright side, Richie Rich says "Oakland..smokin'" like he did on the I Got 5 On It remix, and you can listen to this without being reminded of the stupid ass faces Pharrell kept pulling in the Grindin' video during the tongue-clicking part of the hook :

Anthony and the golden-oldies

Yup, it's a thursday evening appreciation post for a couple of officially unreleased late nineties AZ cuts where he rapped over early eighties classics by Malcolm McLaren & The World's Famous Supreme Team and Grandmaster Master Flash & The Furious Five.

The Firm ft. Half-A-Mill - Firm Biz remix (1997)



What, you didn't think I was gonna plump for Hey AZ as the joint with the Supreme Team sample, did you? Chill, son, because the connoisseur's choice is this now often forgotten remix of Firm Biz. Even though no dirty version of it was ever released, this was a proper remix in the sense that it featured new verses from all concerned, an extra guest rapper in Half-A-Mill, and an entirely new beat which is basically World's Famous before Se'Divine the Mastermind and JazzyJust the Superstar started rapping. The only thing it retains from the original is the Dawn Robinson crooning and even that sounds far more cozy here, which makes me think that someone should really take the acapellas from The Firm album and remix the everything bar Phone Tap, Desperados, and 5 Minutes To Flush over a bunch of classic instrumentals from 1983 - 1985. I'm thinking, like, I'm Leaving over One For The Treble would be a good start because the gawd Nore deserved better for his cameo spot than that beat.

AZ - Sunshine (1998)



This one comes with an interesting yarn attached if you happen to be a fan of trivia which involves rappers getting unwittingly cockblocked by Bad Boy : AZ recorded Sunshine as his main single for Pieces Of A Man with the expectation it'd do for him what If I Ruled The World did for Nas, but he had to scrap it after Puffy & Mase came out with The Message-sampling Can't Hold Me Down first which resulted in him then reusing the lyrics with new production for Pieces Of A (Black) Man. Possibly a wise move after Big L's MVP was halted in its tracks by the One More Chance remix back in 1995, but Sunshine jams regardless and I favour this to the song it eventually became. It used to be that people would rap over The Message every few years back in the 90s (Survival In The Garden by C-Bo is an underrated favourite), but ever since Sugarhill Records released the acapella version of the song last decade all we get are hopeless remixes by hacks like this instead nowadays.

And on that note here's Flash and The Furious Five dipped in leather catsuits, Star Trek shades, and the like performing The Message on UK yoof TV show The Tube back in 1983; Melle Mel's channeling the future spirit of Jodie Marsh with those 2 belts strapped across his bare chest, yet he still looks like less of a fruit than Theopolis London or Yung L.A.



Poor Duke Bootee : not only did he perform all the rapping on the actual recording of The Message bar the last verse but he also composed, played on, and produced the backing track, and what rewards does he get for his tour-de-force auteur performance? Various members of The Furious Five lip-synced over his vocals in the song's video and Duke ends up airbrushed out of history entirely. Still, I'm sure the fact that 95% of the population who've heard the song think it's Grandmaster Flash rather than the Furious Five rapping on it is a form of schadenfreude for Duke, as is that Duke & Duke from Trading Places loot he received when he eventually successfully sued Sugar Hill Records for his publishing.

Martorial elegance : Yelawolf edition

Big Boi ft. Yelawolf - You Ain't No D.J (2010)



Seeing Yelawolf cavorting around in the You Ain't No D.J video looking like every hackneyed tumblr account dedicated to waifish white ppl with ol' Martin Skrtel lookin' ass tattoos distilled into a single saltine rapper nearly kiboshed the song for me entirely, but catching The Fifth Element on TV last week for the first time since 1997 brought forth the revelation that the trick to not letting 'wolf's look (the result of DJ Kno from The CunninLynguists colliding with Nu-Metal one hit wonders Crazy Town) in full motion prevent me from enjoying his music is if I hoodwink myself that he's actually going for that whole intergalatic evil scoundrel swag instead by using Gary Oldman's Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg character as his chief style catalyst :



But Yelawolf signing with Shady Records was the worst artistic move he could've possibly made since it'll result in a bloated major label debut album which is bound to be full of sterile Eminem production instead of Burn One's whoozy Country-Rap beats, and it also means he'll follow Eminem's commercial blueprint and chase the whole downhick dollar with music that's less like this :

Bubba Sparxxx - Lovely (2001)



(I dunno why Bubba berated rappers for "spittin' that booty chatter" on Ugly when the songs on Dark Days, Bright Nights that featured his most intricately crafted rapping and which remain the acme of his career to this day - Lovely, Betty-Betty, Twerk A Little, All The Same, and Open Wide - were all primarily about women.)

with music that's, unfortunately, more like this :

Bubba Sparxxx - Back In The Mud (Travis Barker Remix) (2003)



The phrase ‘Travis Barker remix’ is an even more dread-inspiring triumvirate of words than ‘CJ Mackintosh remix’ once was, and you've every right to shudder because the days when Fieldy from KoRN was a mainstay on Rap records and in Rap videos are seemingly nigh again, signalling that the official Nu-Metal revival will burst asunder in december 2011 when Joe Budden announces that he's collaborating with his spiritual forefathers of gaylord navel-gazing, Papa Roach, on a cover version of their teen-angst sulkfest Last Resort.

Race relations

Before I retire to bed every evening I pray for a Jackie Chain & Bun B collaboration or picture on the morrow so that I can ask Jackie the same question I asked Bobby Hundreds on here back in 2008 : you not familiar with the early UGK hit Cocaine In The Back Of The Ride, doggie?

"Bust a nut on their stomach
wash my dick in the sink
then buy a 40 at the store from the godamn chink"

UGK - Cocaine In The Back Of The Ride O.G version (1988)



In lieu of that, we'll have to ask this AZN streetwear dude chumming it up with Bun AKA MC UGK (™ Thun) in Canada from that Stüssy Keep It Trill video on Hypebeast today instead :

DB, or not to be

DB Tha General - Murda (2010)



I've remained tangled in Murda's web ever since I first heard it in the dusk of 2010, and 3 weeks after copping the Young O.G II 'tape it's taken from, I'm still struggling to digest the whole thing since it's a whopping twenty six tracks deep and there are so many uses of early 80s rap and r&b and late seventies disco classics to process that I've only just decided that B Aware is the second best joint on there :

DB Tha General - B Aware (2011)



Random Husalah shout-outs apropos of no particular reason other than he's Husalah are always welcome 'round these parts, and, although it appeals to the Rap nerd in me when these new Oakland rappers get busy over mid eighties joints, it's always preferable when they use the influence of that era to create something a little more contemporary and carve out a niche for themselves instead, with those icy synths on this being archetypal Livewire. I love that DB is so brazen in his adulation of one Torrance Hatch esquire that he just comes straight out and refers to himself as "The Bay Area Boosie", and I'm imaginging the Blu-ray release of Menace II Society in late 2009 accounts for why a new generation of rappers have been so eager to namecheck it over the last year or so; never a bad thing since that's the one of the few nineties 'hood flicks which still holds up today, and the Pocket Full Of Stones remix is probably my favourite soundtrack-only cut ever as well as the most crucial southern rap song of the nineties.

... or, at the very least, the one which is closest in importance to Face Down, Ass Up by 2 Live Crew :

2 Live Crew - Face Down, Ass Up (live on Donahue, 1990)



I bet Piers Morgan wouldn't have Uncle Luke 'n' the lads on, unless he could guarantee that Brother Marquis would start blubbing after admitting that he regrets how 2 Live Crew stereotyped all AZN hoes as prostitutes who can only communicate in broken English via samples from overrated Kubrick movies.

Calm down, calm down

AZ - The Calm (2010)



My favourite cut from that Doe Or Die 15th Anniversary affair displaying AZ at his cerebral and dense best finally gets a video where Anthony sports a ushanka and a white mink in the snow. You know, I wouldn't say no to a clip for the sumptuous Nothing Move either now that Anthony has got the alledgedly minted Taysha Valez breezy he's engaged to bankrolling him. It's like a reverse rap-version of Mel Gibson going broke ploughing all of his loot into Oksana Grigorieva's musical career, right?

Despite what I may have predicted to the contrary about the Doe Or Die 15th Anniversary project, I've somehow found space in my cold heart for the Gimme Yours 2010, Rather Unique 2010, and Your World Don't Stop 2010 remixes since I can enjoy them as wholly divergent entities to the originals. In fact, with the intro and 4 new cuts, the whole CD jams up until the dying seconds of I'm Ill. After that I Feel 4 U 2010 is an absolute travesty and the live medley + Make Believe bonus cut are as superfluous as you'd expect them to be, so I got my man Sha Deezy to rip the acapella from the album's viral commercial off Youtube to use as my own valediction for the slimmed-down version of the album on my MP3 player :

AZ - Doe Or Die 15th Anniversary commercial acapella (2010)



Step - you wanna chop this shit down to just the acapella before the Gimme Yours 2010 remix comes in so we can all use this as AZ doing-a-Cormega-with-a-token-album-acapella? (*Edit - added*.)

Also, is it possible for any reader of this blog to travel back in time to make sure Premier gives the Project Boy instrumental to AZ instead of the entirely unsuitable Joell Ortiz? If that's a task not quite scientifically possible yet, could we make sure that at least 1 of the 2 good beats Primo is now capable of per annum goes to AZ from now on? Still a task too difficult to realistically excute? Aiight, maybe AZ could just use some of Taysha Valez's loot to pay some Brooklyn goons to assassinate Termanology's microscopic ass to stop him gaffling all the good Primo and Statik Selektah production then?

Motor city, the final frontier

Cybotron - Cosmic Cars (1983)



That real rider music. That 2nd 12" by Juan Atkins & Richard Davis from 1983 which effortlessly straddled multiple genres music. That oh shit Noz just posted that Juan Atkins produced novelty rap record he mentioned in the Danny Brown interview comments music. That how the fuck are we now bragging about our cars being spaceships just because they have talking Sat-Nav when they should at least be able to hover at this point? music. That better than the similarly vehicular-themed (I Like To Do It In) Fast Cars by by Vince Lawrence's first electronic outfit Z Factor music. That Alleys Of The Mind predated Jonzun Crew and Soulsonic Force so Cybotron were the real missing link between Kraftwerk and those early Chicago House joints on Trax Records by Le Noiz, Jack Master Funk, and Adonis, right? music. That need a quick thursday post for the blog and it'll also be an excuse to use the finale of Repo Man music. That how on earth is the only major use of a Cybotron sample by a rapper in a godamn Missy Elliot song? music. That how come Cybotron sounded more futuristic than Model 500 when Juan devised Model 500 as a continuation of the electro sound Cybotron helped pioneer? music.

Ran outta ammo and started throwin' Black Rob RAR files

Five people in the comments Da streetz asked for a Black Rob compilation after I'd posted a few mixtape joints of his recently, so I've whipped and then zipped one up per request. B.R's actually one of the easiest currently active old-man NY rapper to assemble an anthology for since he's relatively slept-on beyond his Bad Boy singles, his catalogue stretches way back to 1991 when he recorded a demo with - of all people! - Automator, and he's still knocking out a few good joints nowadays, though that floppy monkey hat he's wearing on-stage in his latest viral-video Ventilation looks like summat Theophilus London would wear.

There didn't seem any point in including any of his main singles for Bad Boy such as I Dare You, Whoa, Espacio with Lil' Kim & G. Dep, Star In The Hood, and Ready since this is a primer for people who're only familiar with Banco Popular via those singles in the first place. Consider this collection a Black Rob sandwich which uses 1991's The Smoothness as the top slice of bread, Up North from last year as the bottom slice, and 28 personal favourites which range from guest appearances, album cuts, mixtape joints and unreleased gems as the filling. Everybody gotta eat, so tuck in:

Black Rob - Banco Popular's Dirty 30

1. The Smoothness
2. Nuthin' But (with Cru)
3. Make It Hot
4. 24 Hours To Live (with Ma$e, The Lox & DMX)
5. I Love You, Baby (with Puffy)
6. The Heist
7. One Way (with G. Dep)
8. Life Story (with Cheryl Pepsi Riley)
9. Can I Live? (with The Lox)
10. Thug Story
11. B.R (with G. Dep)
12. Let's Get It (with G. Dep & Puffy)
13. Business Never Personal
14. Permanent Scars AKA Live From The Eastside
15. Godfather (with Puffy & G. Dep)
16. Time 2 Ride AKA They Heard I Got Life O.G version
17. Questions And Answers
18. Broken Bottles (with Aasim & Wise G)
19. Y'All Know Who Killed Him
20. You Know What
21. Smile In Ya Face
22. Help Me Out
23. Jeans And Sneakers (with Notorious B.I.G)
24. Knock 'Em Out
25. High In The Clouds (with O.D.B)
26. New York
27. Live At The Bar-BBQ 2007 (with D-Dot, Notorious B.I.G, Ness & Aasim)
28. Big Guns
29. No Fear
30. Up North

~~> DOWNLOAD HERE <~~

Feel free to use this as a soundtrack the next time you shoplift a scandalously priced can of liquid elastoplast from your local chemist/supermarket, safe in the knowledge that a kleptomaniac like Black Rob would approve. Just don't hold your breath for me to hook up a Loon's greatest hits or a Best Of Mark Curry next, though.