When I was six my mother sent me on a mission that would forever shape my view on music. I was supposed to walk a few doors down to the very end of our apartment building to let my oldest sister know it was time for dinner. Before I even reached the neighbors door I could hear “Jam On It” by Newcleus blaring from inside the apartment. I knocked and was let in by another kid who directed me through the house and onto the back patio where my sister and a mob of other teenagers were standing in a semi circle around two guys doing the strangest dance moves I’d ever seen. One of the teenagers was spinning in circles at what seemed like 100 mph… but he was doing it upside down… on his head. I was blown away.
I made my way through the crowd never taking my eyes off of the two guys now spinning on their backs atop an old piece of cardboard. When I finally reached my sister I could tell that I had seen something I wasn’t supposed to see. She was only thirteen but most of the other teens seemed older. So much older, in fact, that she wasn’t even supposed to be there. On the walk back to our apartment she told me that the Puerto Rican guy who was spinning on his head was named Angel (I think) and he was the best break dancer in our neighborhood. She asked me to keep quiet when we got home and when we finished dinner she would take me back to watch the older kids dance. I was ecstatic!
The eighties went on and I grew out of idolizing my older sister and wanting to be part of whatever she and her friends were into, but I always remembered that day. By eighth grade some guys that I would skateboard with were listening to the Check Your Head album by The Beastie Boys and the feeling I felt in 1984 came rushing back. I was listening to a lot of punk at the time but the Beasties somehow found a way to blend a multitude of genres together on their albums. It was a great way to break back into hip hop for the second time in my life. I was hooked on that album and listened to it on repeat for three months until I knew every word on every track.
The next year my family was packing up to head back to the east coast, Delaware to be specific, where I could pickup stations like Q102 out of Philadelphia. I was easing into rap music but when we moved to Maryland my best friend gave me a tape by A Tribe Called Quest called The Low End Theory. After a single listen I was certifiably hooked on hip hop and continued to buy more and more albums until my entire dresser was covered in tape cases.
My addiction to hip hop lasted through the nineties, but when the bulk of producers stopped sampling funk, jazz , classic rock and Motown and most emcees couldn’t spit a single verse without mentioning what kind of watch they wore or how much their car cost I lost interest. Hip hop had gone mainstream and brands like Sprite were making a killing off of my generation’s version of rock-n-roll. The beats got watered down and a formula was in place to sell records. Brag a little, write a catchy hook over a regurgitated 80′s hit song and you had a record. If an emcee didn’t mind doing a corny dance in front of a wind machine in an empty airplane hangar he could probably go platinum. I hated it.
I still listen to hip hop on a regular basis but these days I have to dig a little deeper to find the good stuff. The kind of music that shaped my teenage years is back where it belongs… underground. This play list is an homage to a small handful of groups that made the nineties, what I feel to be, the apex of hip hop.