If yesterday’s rant did anything, it made me grateful I have the opportunity to spotlight music I genuinely enjoy, care about, or otherwise believe in with countless amounts of people on a daily basis. I don’t have a clueless program-director telling me what to play on my radio show, or advertisers demanding I stick to a certain format. I don’t have a lot of editorial oversight getting in my way, or a bunch of people telling me what to write about on my blogs either. I discover music on my own and present it to people in a spirit of freedom that often seems lacking, not only in Hip-Hop radio or radio in general (where the DJ as record-breaking tastemaker is virtually non-existent), but in the media period.
Thankfully there are still Rap artists making music that “keeps it real” while appealing to that “anything goes” mindset (in the tradition of the DJs who dug in the crates and racks for different shit, blurring genres and creating the art-form know as Hip-Hop in the process), even if the same openness can’t be expected of industry “tastemakers.” A group like New York-based duo 1000dbs & Ryan O’Neil for example is precisely the sort of Hip-Hop act I love to discover for the simple fact that they make a brand of sample-happy Hip-Hop that’s a direct extension of what I was listening to in the early-to-mid-’90s, but which you’d think didn’t exist at all anymore if your only exposure to Hip-Hop was the various radio stations “where Hip-Hop lives” around the country.
Listen to “Hustle”
Don’t get me wrong, their album The Adventures of the One Hand Bandit and the Slum Computer Wizard is far from “throwback Rap.” It’s just a new formula of that “real Hip-Hop” based around the familiarity of classic breakbeats, inventive sampling, and straightforward rhymes that are grounded in reality and “the streets” without conceding to popular “gangsta” clichés. They don’t pretend to be Native Tongues or try to imitate the output of D.I.T.C., but they come off like the logical antecedent of those artists, as if the lineage from one to the other has remained unbroken by the last 10 years of capitalist confusion, or at least as if the reigns of those artists had continued uninterrupted.
DJ and producer 100dbs kills the beats and dusty loops throughout, but sparkles acutely on joints like “Killer Combo,” “Must Be Love,” and both “Get Down!” and “Hustle” where he freaks some of the most clever and expertly integrated vocal samples I’ve heard recently. Some of emcee Ryan O’Neil’s better moments come on the same tracks, especially the non-stop slick-talk of “Get Down!,” the crate-digger references of “Killer Combo,” and the love-letter to music “Must Be Love.” And when they get a little naughty on tracks like “Do You Feel Me,” “Get Low” and “She Got a Body” the result is some of the most original pimp shit since Dres was kicking it with his “Similak Child” back in 1991.
All I can hope is that the way our music is presented changes enough so that when some aging Hip-Hop head listens to a group like 100dbs & Ryan O’Neil 10 years from now they can just listen without feeling compelled to point at the speaker saying “this is why I can’t listen to Rap anymore.”
-El Keter
