(From All Souled Out EP; 1991)
First time ya boi ever heard Pete Rock & CL Smooth was when I caught The Creator video on YO! MTV Raps in 1991. It hit all my same pleasure-zones as Chubb Rock's Treat 'Em Right and Digital Underground & 2Pac's Same Song, and proved certain high school m8s wrong who now thought Rave singles like Altern 8's Activ 8 (Come With Me) were the most fun you could find in music. Imagine my surprise when I picked up a copy of Pete & CL's All Souled Out EP a month or later only to find out that CL Smooth was the rapper & Pete Rock was the producer/DJ who had one solo track on their EP. And why wouldn't Young Marty be surprised? I had no idea Pete was a New York radio DJ, and The Creator video presented Pete upfront as the rapper and CL playing the background as the DJ (CL even performed the scratch-solo in the video!) Picture me okie-doked like those folks who thought Grandmaster Flash was the main rapper in The Furious Five.
Listening to the Pete Rock songs Grand Puba wrote like The Creator and the Pete Rock productions Grand Puba guested on like Don't Curse and Skinz, the same question always ricochets and reverberates around my brain: why did Puba not bag himself some Pete Rock beats for his Reel To Reel album? The answer was Puba's combination of arrogance and stinginess: according to Dante Ross, Puba wanted to do it himself, as cheaply as possible. Oh well, at least we got Pete's song-saving remix of Puba's Issues a decade later in 2002.
Did fellow Gen X old headz also used to record songs off YO! MTV Raps from VHS onto cassette tape? There wasn't a national Rap radio show in Britain until Westwood moved to the BBC in 1994 so the only Rap I could tape off the radio were the big top 40 hits. Nor could ya boi afford to splosh out on two song imported 12" singles because I was still in high school and EPs + albums were far better value for my pocket money. Shit was far from ideal but how else was I gonna jam Dre & Snoop's Deep Cover and Ultramagnetic's Poppa Large remix on my walkman or boombox? An echoey VHS-to-cassette recording of the video mix of Check It Out by Puba & Mary was the early 1990s equivalent of a tinny 128 kbps MP3 ripped from Soundcloud.
I didn't have access to Yo MTV Raps until the mid nineties after my dad got Sky for the football lol.
ReplyDeleteMaxwell over PR beats was def needed.
Before my folks got Sky a m8 of mine used to record YO! and 120 Minutes for me. Taped me series 1 of Round The Twist when it was repeated on Sky too.
ReplyDelete"Picture me okie-doked like those folks who thought Grandmaster Flash was the main rapper in The Furious Five."
ReplyDeleteCould have been worse, I used to think Terminator X was the main rapper in Public Enemy.
"There wasn't a national Rap radio show in Britain until Westwood moved to the BBC." revisionist much? There was a Radio 1 Rap show on Thursday evenings in the early 90s ("The Rap Selection," 9pm, presented by Pete Tong, 1990-2). . When Tim'll Fix It finally turned up on Radio 1 in 94, he inherited the slots previously occupied by Mark Tonderai's Rap shows.
ReplyDeleteI thought that Tonderai's shows were more genralist? The ones I heard played as much Reggae, R&B and N.Y House as Rap.
ReplyDeleteNever knew Tong did Rap shows though. Who got tape rips?
Spart, I bet lots of people thought Eric B was the rapper when Eric B & Rakim first came out.
ReplyDelete(re Mark Tonderai's Rap show) Yeh the saturday edition did skew more commercial/party vibes (as did Noncewood) but it was definitely a rap show. Don't have any tapes of the Pete Tong Rap show - but it wasn't exactly high on banter or memorable guests anyway. it was just a selection of big tunes at the time (e.g. Ice Cube, Tim Dog, Hijack, NW1, NWA, Public Enemy etc).
ReplyDeleteI found this Tong one: his biggest Rap songs of 1991 countdown.
ReplyDeletehttps://m.mixcloud.com/RANDOMRAPRADIO/pete-tong-rap-selection-of-1991-radio-1-2-jan-92-remastered/
Very surprised he was still playing Rap then. I thought all that lot had jumped ship to Dance music by 1990.
Just listened to that Tong show in full. Very enjoyable... until he played a Gunshot song at number 4 and then played a Hijack song at number 2 🤮
ReplyDelete[cue Hovis ad music]: When I was a kid, Sky TV was for millionaires. My only experience of "Yo! MTV Raps" comes from hanging around a branch of Dixons on Saturday late-afternoons and catching bits of the show on their demo TV. Oh! And I seem to remember Channel 4 once airing an MTV "History of Rap" program which included a medley style song in which a bunch of rap luminaries (Ice-T, Fab 5 Freddy, Kool G Rap & Polo etc) dropped couplets paying tribute to the show.
ReplyDeleteAh I remember that C4 show.
ReplyDeleteThat Pluto TV app has a music station which just shows old episodes of YO! on a loop all day, every day.
My father had blank video cassettes up until the 2010s where he recorded music videos of songs he liked off Video Music Box and Yo!. Going back to them infuriated me because you'd see four seconds of a Too Short or Spice 1 video but he bothered to record Eazy-E "Only If You Want It". Incredible curation.
ReplyDelete😆 the idiosyncrasies of East Coast taste.
ReplyDeleteI first heard Too $hort via YO! on the episode where they played The Ghetto. Blew my tiny mind.
THAT IS LITERALLY THE VIDEO HE CUT OFF!!!!!!!
ReplyDelete😂 now that's some "never forgive action".
ReplyDeleteMy older brother lived in Switzerland and would record me Yo! with the adverts edited out on double speed VHS and post them to me.
ReplyDeleteTop lad.
Top tier brotherly love.
ReplyDelete