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Weekly updates


RU - Lost tapes stay winning

So I woke up in with a mild booze and kush hangover and rolled over to see if anything good was happening on the internets. Turns out my old mate DJ Kenny Parker was about to unleash some of his collection of recordings of his younger brother KRS-One rapping in his younger days on the radio in half an hour! Having gone into great detail about his plans to release some of this stuff back in 2006 when I first interviewed him (including a tape of Kris struggling to be heard over a barking dog), actually hearing this stuff was nothing short of jaw-dropping. Just like the time I was able to share the two original versions of A Tribe Called Quest’s seminal posse cut Scenario with the world, once again digitised lost tapes have reminded me exactly why I become completely obsessed with this thing called rap music.

The proceeding audio was 22 minutes of hip-hop gold, as we get to witness a youthful Kris Parker kicking an early version of Bridge Is Over, busting the first verse of Criminal Minded over Funky Drummer (“I’m 20 years old, Scott La Rock is 24 / We’ll sign your autographs when we come back from tour”), unleashing a Ladi Dadi style story over a D-Nice beatbox (complete with Human Nature interpolation) and a freestyle over the Star Wars breakbeat from more recent times. I challenge anybody with even a passing appreciation of rap to listen to this without breaking into a cheesy grin at some point.

Although many a crunchy old rap purist has bored people to death over the years banging on about the “four elements” and “True School”, the fact remains that hearing a rapper combined with two copies of a record being spun back and forth will always be the best indication of how good they are. If you caught the shameful ‘stare at the floor and mumble because I don’t know how to rap on classic breaks’ performance from Travi$ Scott, it’s still a sure-fire way to separate the wheat from the chaff in this here rap shit. As AZ’s Thank You demonstrated earlier this year, there needs to be a prerequisite introduced where every rapper dude on the planet is obliged to release a minimum of one song per year which features them dropping bars over classic breaks.

Will the rap world adapt to this admittedly far-fetched standard as law in the near future? Doubtful, unless some members of the mighty Conservative Rap Coalition are elected into the Temple of Hip-Hop or get an internship at Worldstar or whatever it is you have to do to get things done around here. In the meantime, if you happen to be related to any legendary rappers and have a bunch of amazing unreleased recordings of them from their heyday, please forward them to the usual address and do your thing for keeping the cause of Rap That Doesn’t Suck alive and well.

Keep up with Robbie’s weekly ‘No Country for Old (Rap) Men’ here.