Blogarhythms

Aside from all those mixtapes I’ve been blabbing about, a good portion of my Summer so far was spent revisiting old Hip-Hop albums. Having access to excessive amounts of digital storage and portable media players inspired me to replace the collection of cassette tapes languishing in a duffle bag in my bedroom with a folder full of MP3’s on my hard drive. Now my Zune is full of 80’s & ’90s Hip-Hop, and many a city bus ride, walk around the block, or afternoon spent in the sun on a nearby bench has since been soundtracked with the vintage boom-bap I grew up on.

You might remember my mentioning in a post a few months ago that the first classic Hip-Hop album I reached out for when the weather got hot was Wu-Tang Clan member Raekwon’s heavily Ghostface Killah- featuring 1995 solo debut Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. For me the infamous “purple tape” remains the penultimate warm-weather Hip-Hop album, a sonic manifestation of the heat, humidity, heightened violence, sexuality, paranoia, tension and danger that are attributes of a “Summer in the city,” which felt as “dirty and gritty” as John Sebastian’s sweaty neck in the Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1960’s classic of the same name.

My association of OB4CL with Summer is undoubtedly bolstered by the music and it’s lyrical content itself, but was certainly bolstered by the fact that it dropped — thirteen years ago to the day — during the so-called “dog days” of Summer. A string of singles and leaked tracks from the album had dominated college radio shows and mixtapes for months. I spent many a late-night calling in to husky-voiced female DJs and burgeoning turntablists at local radio stations requesting “Ice Cream” and dedicating “Incarcerated Scarfaces” to a family friend who happened to be locked in a local correctional institute. And once it hit the streets that purple tape didn’t leave my tape-deck until GZA’s Liquid Swords supplanted its place and ushered in Winter come November.

Regardless of the weather Only Built 4 Cuban Linx has remained one of my favorite albums of all time, one of the ten Hip-Hop albums I’d hold up as the best the genre has ever produced, and one of the records that still provides the blueprint for what I think a Hip-Hop album is supposed to sound like. A great deal of the responsibility foe the album’s greatness can unquestionably be heaped upon Wu-Tang mastermind The RZA, whose filthy, cinematic aesthetic was at it’s peak. His unflinchingly lo-fi recording formula and the way he maniacally stitched off-kilter samples to unyielding drum-loops and samurai-sliced chops on songs like “Incarcerated Scarfaces,” “Criminology” and “Glaciers of Ice” had me envisioning dude in a basement surrounded by record crates, members of the Clan, and clouds of smoke, back-to-back mixing breakbeats, banging on drum-machine pads and dubbing samples live, mix-tape style, to overloaded 4-track tapes before sending Rae and company to record their vocals in a musty bathroom. It was dirty as fuck, it thumped hard, and (even in its sweat-slicked, garbage-strewn, abandoned apartment building ugliness) it was beautifully pure in a way the genre isn’t anymore.

The remainder of the accolades can all be piled at the feet of Raekwon and his partner in crime Ghostface Killah, who began going by the comic-book-inspired alias Tony Starks on OB4CL, for their lyrical and vocal performances throughout the album. Even in 1995, before every rapper became a thug, mafioso or international criminal kingpin, tales of drugs, crime and street violence were familiar clichés, so recording an album that dealt with those themes wasn’t groundbreaking in and of itself. But both Rae and Ghost (and the other members of the Clan who took part) took the Martin Scorsese-esque crime-inspired visual storytelling which had been the forte of lyrical giant Kool G Rap, the bold-faced backpack thuggery of the recently risen Black Moon, the God-speak of NGE-inspired groups like Poor Righteous Teachers and Brand Nubian, and the colorful eccentricity of Ultramagnetic MC’s and skit-happy acts De La Soul & K.M.D., and squeezed it all through a sieve of abstract vernacular that extracted a pulpy, Salvador Dalí-esque picture of urban life in the mid 1990’s. It was scary, funny, accurately realistic, comically exaggerated, whimsical, gruesome, ignorant and enlightening all at once. They and their Wu brethren dropped jewels, made threats, sampled obscure Hong-Kong action movies, talked about titties, glorified the drug trade, hero-worshipped the Mafia (inspiring amongst rappers a trend whose effects are still being felt today), promoted the 5% Nation, and referenced the pornographic Anime Legend of the Overfiend on the same album. Even the only guest appearance from a non-Clan-member, the first on a Wu-Tang album at the time, by Nas on “Verbal Intercourse,” remains one of the best lyrical and vocal performances of his career to date.

It’s albums like Only Built 4 Cuban Linx that make it hard for me to take too much of the output from high-profile Hip-Hop artists now-a-days too seriously. I like my Hip-Hop to sound like it was recorded by somebody in my neighborhood, not a multi-million-dollar studio somewhere. I like it to sound like the beats were sewn together, Frankenstein-style, by a mad scientist from pieces of vinyl mercilessly vivisectioned out of records stolen from secret caches by a crime-obsessed comic-book nerd dressed as a Ninja. I like it to sound like the emcees are corrupted geniuses who can identify hand-gun models and types of flashy jewelry as easily as they can quoteesoteric pseudo-religious terminology, rattle off a recipe for crack or name-check a bullet-ballet director and posses an almost supernaturally eclectic vocabulary with which to do it.

I got all of that when I walked into the now closed local Hip-Hop retailer The Music Center and copped that purple tape 13 years ago. And even if I only rarely get the same out of contemporary Hip-Hop albums I’ll always be able to revisit Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. Rae might have been built for Cuban links, but OB4CL was built to be a classic, and I was built to love it.