The American rapper and respected visual artist blazed a trail as a founding member of Jurassic 5. Here, he puts forward his all-time top 10 albums… Run-D.M.C – Tougher Than Leather “Run-D.M.C solidified my love of the back and forth routines of old. Although the routine of back-and- forth rap was done to perfection by The Cold Crush Brothers and The Furious Five, Run-D.M.C brought … Continue reading Jurassic 5’s Chali 2na’s Top 10 Albums
From block-party origins to multi-millionaire empires, no music quite represents the ‘American Dream’ (and nightmare) like hip-hop. Michael Leonard digs through 40-plus years of LPs from wildly differing styles of urban music born of vinyl itself… In August 1973, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the west Bronx, there was a party: 25c for ‘ladies’ and 50c for ‘fellas’. And that, says legend, is when hip-hop … Continue reading The Top 40 Essential Hip-Hop Vinyl
On their debut album, 3 Feet High And Rising, Long Island trio De La Soul forged a vibrant new template for hip-hop, radically different from the macho posturing of their contemporaries. Forty years on from its release, Neil Crossley charts the creation of a suburban-inspired masterpiece… On 6 April 2011, the US Library of Congress unveiled a list of 25 recordings, drawn up the previous … Continue reading De La Soul – 3 Feet High and Rising
Despite often costing far less than a regular LP, many samplers have become highly collectible. Surely a definitive list of 40 is impossible? Step forward Mark Sampson… The birth of the sampler album is generally attributed to Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra Records. With no budget for advertising, he looked for other ways of promoting his catalogue (then) of folk and world music. Always … Continue reading The Essential: Samplers
Some artists develop their sound over the course of a long career, working gradually towards a creative peak, while others hit the ground running and deliver a fully realised masterwork at the first time of asking. And it’s the latter group we pay tribute to here as Gary Tipp names vinyl’s greatest debut albums… Debut albums have several advantages over what follows in a band’s … Continue reading The 60 Greatest Debut Albums Of All Time
The women of garage rock, grunge pop and indie have been busy. Chris Parkin celebrates a slew of tremendous new vinyl releases. There’s only one rule concerning album announcements: don’t do it on the same day that Sleater-Kinney reveal to the world they’re recording a new album with Annie Clark (aka St Vincent). At least that’s the “note-to-self” that Mary Timony – Carrie Brownstein and … Continue reading Genre Hopping: Female-fronted pioneers
The DJ, rapper and producer is putting modern Kenyan music on the global map Sam Willis It’s probably fair to say that Africa’s music ecosystem is often overlooked in the UK as a landscape of popular music stardom. The reasons for this oversight are unclear and certainly unjustfi ed, as it is evidently not for lack of quality. In Kenya, and Nairobi speci fically, there is a … Continue reading On The Radar: Blinky Bill
Producer and Cypress Hill member DJ Muggs digs out an otherworldly jam that captures the fusion of art and music at the heart of the old-school era, and tells Sam Willis how it influenced him… “The record I love the most is a record called Beat Bop. It’s very abstract and very illogical and awkward. Rammellzee has this kind of a style in his art, … Continue reading Why I Love… DJ Muggs interview
