Date: 1983
Release: RHINO
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“Somebody… anybody… help me… scream!” insists Chief Rocker Busy Bee and you best believe the party people oblige. Recorded mostly in a dark and sweaty little rap club called the Dixie in the South Bronx, the soundtrack to the movie Wild Style may be the ultimate source for old school rap and hip-hop. It’s the original shit – slick, young rappers with the lyrical prowess boasting and bragging, badder than bad, all over the steadiest, funkiest beats and scratches. The film, the story of a legendary graffiti artist named Zoro who’s pursued by a reporter amidst the throbbing South Bronx rap scene, was made in 1982, predating what is considered the first rap album on CD, Run DMC’s 1984 debut. The music from the film sounds as fresh and visionary today as it did then, the rhythmic and rhyming skills of the rappers and DJs undeniable, flowing with finesse and rock solid confidence.

The a capella rapping on the tracks “Basketball Throwdown,” “Stoop Rap” and “Street Rap” is especially raw and potent. Hearing the birth of what is now popular music’s most dominant genre in the spontaneous street poetry of young city kids is a deep thrill. Other stand-out cuts, wall-to-wall with funky beats and relentlessly skillful raps, are “MC Battle,” “Fantastic Freaks at the Dixie,” “Cold Crush Bros. at the Dixie,” and “Double Trouble at the Amphitheatre.” The music of Wild Style has been sourced and sampled a million ways, inspiring a million styles, earning the CD the feel of a sacred text for the hip-hop universe.

Date: March 23, 1999
Release: Motel Records #3
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Bombay the Hard Way plays like the soundtrack to some imaginary 1970s B-films with names like Shaft’s Bad-Ass Pilgrimage To India or Ganges Ghetto Payback. Featuring the music of Indian composers (and brothers) Anandji and Kalyanji Shah, who wrote and produced soundtracks for the so-called “Brownsploitation” films made in India’s “Bollywood” during the 60s and 70s, this saffron-funk project is the brain-child of Dan “The Automator” Nakamura, Bay Area producer / remixer of Dr. Octagon fame, with additional beats provided by the immensely talented DJ Shadow. The end product is a potent cross-pollination of Secret-Agent-Man guitar themes, Blaxploitation grooves, jazzy horn and flute riffs, hip-hop beats and loops, and traditional Indian instrumentation.

While this East meets West mixture is incredibly funky, there are few innovations or surprises within. Beyond the sweeping and intense orchestrations of the opening track, “Bombay 405 Miles,” the album tends to value mood and groove over tunes.

That said, there are still some particularly strong standouts. “The Good, The Bad, And The Chutney” and “Inspector Jay From Dehli” are mysterious Spy-thriller grooves, loaded with sitars, spacey synths, orchestral breaks, and DJ Shadow‘s laid back beats. Like much of the album, these two songs are heavily spiced Indian approximations of the cinematic funk found on Blaxploitation soundtracks by Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, and Willie Hutch.

“Professor Pyarelal” is a deliciously slow Barry White-styled groove that blends funky flute, bass, and drums with atmospheric synthesizer and jazz piano. The album’s only song with lyrics, “Ganges A Go-Go,” features a sound straight out of the Indian quarter of London’s “swinging 60s” scene. Over a driving Go-Go beat and Eastern-flavored horn arrangements, a handful of male and female singers (with cute Indian accents) belt out the lines,

“I got no time to think / Cuz’ I need somebody to love / Yeah! / Baby, I love you so / But you can’t love me more / Why don’t you hold me closer / And I’ll give you more / Yeah!”

With lyrics like that, this song is destined to wind up on one of my more kitchy MustHear.com mixes. Throughout the album, there are fun snatches of dialogue lifted straight out of vintage “brownsploitation” films. These digressions add to the overall enjoyment, helping to make Bombay the Hard Way a classic party record for the new millennium.

Date: 1975
Release: A&M/Horizon #0809
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“In France, and maybe the rest of the world, I am not considered like a real hip-hop DJ–and I don’t want to be considered a real hip-hop DJ, because I love so many different styles of music. My way of working came from the hip-hop, but I try to expand it.”

– DJ Cam

The number of people who ought to concern themselves with the musical innovations of DJ Cam runs into the millions. A former Parisian graffiti artist, Laurent Daumail (aka DJ Cam) has released several undeniably hip-hop records that radically rewrite the rules of the genre. Neglected in his native France, audiences in the US, UK, and Japan have embraced his envelope pushing style of downbeat hip-hop, helping to amplify the global impact of such kindred artists as DJ Shadow and DJ Krush.

An avowed enemy of the synthesizer, DJ Cam crafts his complex music with the barest of tools: a couple turntables, a sampler, and a mixer. Far removed from any hip-hop on the charts, his laid-back sound seamlessly blends obscure and familiar basement samples with thick bass lines, tricked-up scratching, and imaginative breaks.

While steeped in the classic hip-hop sounds of the mid-80s (think Public Enemy), DJ Cam‘s sprawling style encompasses a range of musical influences that goes far beyond his core hip-hop roots. His greatest talent lies in his ability to fuse hip-hop with such diverse genres as jazz, jungle, dub, funk, and orchestral scores–and to do so often within a single song.

Although always mixing many influences into his musical palette, it is heavy strains of old-school jazz that define the instrumentals found on DJ Cam‘s 1996 release, Substances. Previously unreleased in America, this fantastically mellow record plunders the jazz vaults for stirring samples from such artists as John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry and others. An engrossing and often beautiful set of songs, Substances is, as Cam explains, “an ambient album, something for the home.”

The album opens with a brief but punchy hip-hop intro–a pledge of allegiance of sorts–explicitly framing the musical explorations that follow in a hip-hop context. Turntable scratching opens the next track, “Friends And Enemies,” before gently giving way to Coltrane riffs, pitched down beats, eerie strings, and spoken words by Malcolm X. After a brief jazz-sampled interlude entitled “Essences,” the mood heads East on “Meera,” a hypnotic song where arabic rhythms and atmospheric drone instruments are bent and twisted around the spiritual voicings of Kakoli Sengupta. The obscure avant funk groove of Don Cherry’s Brown Rice finds a new home as the core sample in “Sound System Children,” an up front track with plenty of drive, while the opening theme to the film “Interview With the Vampire” is extracted to form the basis of the album’s most epic downtempo track, “Twilight Zone.” “Outro” closes out the record with a book-end slice of abstract hip-hop.

A lush journey into an alternate universe of hip-hop, Substances is a groundbreaking record that reveals the infinite possibilities in music. Like all musical innovators, DJ Cam‘s strikingly individual brand of music fails to fit inside any rigid definitions, and he just might have to wait for the unknowing millions to catch on.

Date: September 24, 2002 (release)
Release: Sub Pop #600
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Mos Def will make you believe in hip hop again. What’s that? You don’t listen to that crap? This album is reason to re-evaluate that stance. If you’re one of those that “Used to Love H.E.R.”, check out Mos’ debut and fall in love all over again.

Although the popular first single from the album (“Ms. Fat Booty”) may seem like standard fare, the opener “Fear Not of Man” is a tribute/update of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti‘s “Fear Not For Man”–a bold step away from the strict American/Jamaican musical orthodoxy of Hiphop. This sets the tone for the album; in the spirit of Fela he deals with real issues such as environmentalism (“New World Water”), under-education and other social/economic inequities (“Mathematics”), and racism (“Mr. Nigga”).

Did I forget to mention that Mos Def has actual musicians (not merely samples) on several of the tracks? Weldon Irvine Jr. (Jazz-Funk keyboardist extraordinaire sampled by A Tribe Called Quest for “Award Tour”), Will I Am (of Black Eyed Peas), Mos Def himself, and others contribute parts on “real” instruments. Mos sings (!)–quite nicely, actually–on several songs, including the second single “Umi says” which contains–read this carefully–NO RAPPING!!

All this seems quite revolutionary compared to the million selling Puff Daddy/Master P/Missy & Timbaland/Dr. Dre & Eminem vibe that has apparently taken over hip hop. Maybe the hip hop underground has found its trojan horse in Mos Def‘s popularity and appeal to the mainstream. Help hip hop become subversive again, BUY THIS ALBUM!!