Follow The (Imperious) Leader

Rappers, dump your bespoke Jesus-piece medallions and cop yourself a vintage 1978 Battlestar Galactica official merchandise pendent of Imperious Leader. Late 70s kids turning up to infant school with that thing around their necks must have felt like Slick Rick in 1988. The pendents were never released in the U.K, but we did get Mattel's Imperious Leader action figure after Battlestar Galactica mania hit Britain in the early 1980s. File it under 'action figures which looked like Colonel Gaddafi meets Purple Aki.'

In 1990 Mattel released the first ever The Simpsons figures including a Bart Simpson & skateboard figure which was the blueprint for Gucci Mane's amazing Bart Simpson chain. If Jeezy had his wits about him he'd have responded by getting a chain made modelled on Mattel's Nelson Muntz & trashcan figure, but with Bart's legs sticking out of the trashcan. Crazy visionz, BOOM:

Yeah, in the past year I've become one of those sad late 40-something blokes who use vintage toy figures as objet d'art ornaments for my desk and shelves. Holla @ ya host if you wanna sell me a Baron Greenback bully figure for around the £20 mark.

They Reminisce Over YO!

Pete Rock & CL Smooth - The Creator
(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.

No More Talk

Faith No More - From Out Of Nowhere
(From Top Of The Pops TV show; 1990)


Here's Faith No More actin' the collective fool miming their way through From Out Of Nowhere on British TV; peep 1:24 for some prime Mike Patton pisstaking. This was the only time FNM (semi) performed From Out Of Nowhere on television, which is kinda surprising even though the band were Bigger In Britain™ than they were in America. In fact, FNM's The Real Thing LP is culturally significant in Britain as the missing link between Guns N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction and Nirvana's Nevermind in the pantheon of U.S Rock albums which were popular amongst most of the U.K's yoof tribes. Me & my m8s or the mosher-posse could jam the album's opening trifecta of From Out Of Nowhere, Epic and Falling To Pieces in our high school common-room in 1990 and the only people who'd complain were the birds who solely listened to teeny-bopper boybands and the Jehovah's Witness lad who snitched to the teachers whenever we'd play Ice-T or N.W.A.

Turns out Faith No More were also Bigger Down Under™ than they were in America, with The Real Thing going platinum in Australia, and Epic hitting the number one and two spots on the Australian and New Zealand singles charts. That, however, isn't remotely surprising: of course FNM were huge in the two countries where Bermuda shorts, sleeveless t-shirrs and under-shaves were thee height of fashion. Roddy Bottom even sounds like the name of a bloke who played in the 1990 Australian cricket team.

Bonus beats: FNM performing Epic and Edge Of The World on Ed Lover & Doctor Dré's Yo! MTV Raps spin-off Da Show. Gonna hazard a guess Ed & Dré didn't quite get the gist of Edge Of The World's lyrics or they might not have been so enthusiastic about joining in on back-up dancer/vocalist duties. That's a song better suited to Westwood and Adam22.

Kool & The Lads

My one contribution to the 50 Years Of HipHip #content nonsense: the t-shirt I got Kool Herc to sign when I saw him DJ Liverpool back in 2000. This was not long after I'd read Style Writing From The Underground and become obsessed with 1970's New York tags, so it was worth sacrificing a fresh tee for. Herc was much shorter than he looked in Beat This: A Hip-Hop History and tried to fool us by playing Fusion Beats Vol 2 and pretending he was doing the mixing on it himself, but he put on a very entertaining show with loadsa classic breaks, and was a convivial raconteur on the mic with anecdotes about his old parties. Mercifully, for such a Real Hip-Hop™ night, we were spared the sight of a buncha annoying breakdancers homoerotically rolling round on the dancefloor together and gurning at each other.

Dan Greenpeace was the support DJ and played a blinder of a set. It woz the night I first heard Spoonie Gee's Spoonie Is Back, Kev-E-Kev & Ak-B's Listen To The Man, Mad Skillz' Ghost Writer and Big Scoob's Kryptonite. Add some classics like Special Ed's I Got It Made and The Beatnuts' Off The Books and Watch Out Now, and you had an upper-echelon Rap connoisseur experience in a Scouse backstreet bar. Greenpeace also played the Cage song his Bad Magic label released on 12" which is surely the only Cage song a DJ could play in such a set. All in all, one of the best No Fakin' club nights alongside Edan's first Liverpool show in 2002 or 2003.

It was a What Everyone Wants blank tee Kool Herc tagged for me and I would kill for a plug on that brand's deadstock t-shirts. Best blank tees in British high Street history or wot? Perfect fit for a lanky lithe bastard like me, sold for £2.99 a pop, and came in a multitude of colours. What Everyone Wants became a citizen of British high street Hades in 2003, but I'd copped so many of their blank tees on my travels that I was still rockin' fresh ones when Sean Price dropped Onion Head.