Three Boom-Bap Big-Crew Bangers You Might Not Have Heard Yet
One of the ways I defend myself from automated spectacles and simulation is digging back to artifacts I know I can trust.
One blessing about being a Gen Xer? I got to live half my life in the pre-internet era. I’ve got the frame of reference that helps me find and remember real-deal media, confident that the vibration I’m getting, even via YouTube ,came from human vocal chords and real people in a real neighborhood that jangled and whomped in a real place in time.
Nothing whomped better than that big-crew phase of boom bap that hit its peak around 1993-94. Think Leaders of the New School. Onyx. Fu-Schickens. Think massive snare hits yoked to a jazz bass sample and a chaser of echoing horns.
I thought I’d mapped all the major and minor points of the this microera when I picked my way past the most obvious plays and started adding tracks by outfits like Rumpletilskinz and Yaggfu Front.
I was just scratching the surface. Here for a jolt of authentic energy is a crew called Now Born Click, whose cassette EP goes for a lot of money on Discogs; I don’t think they hung around long enough to make an album.
Lace your Timbs up for this one:
Here’s another stomper for you: “Trouble Wreck” by the Troubleneck Brothers, all seven of them.
They got this one on rotation on Rap City, where you can see they’re running every part of the template, both in track production and video style, because it looks like they got half the city out for the take where they’re quasi-moshing for the shouted chorus. I still prefer the audio:
So you know Ice T, right? His production and rhyming posse was Rhyme Syndicate.
Somehow, there was a dude from the UK who was loosely affiliated with them named Red Venom.
Anyway, here’s a crew called Freakin Inglish from Salford & Manchester getting in on the act. I think they understood the assignment:
It takes a human guide to get to the best, I think still. Because while imaginationless AI hyperscalers ruin the future, they’re making unwelcome raids on memory, too.
Now I have to be careful when hunting down an old audiobook because they’re scraping my favorite novels and reading those with robots and doing cultural retrospectives whose scripts stink of LLM phraseology.
You’re better off trusting people for the good stuff.