DJ Premier and Mr. Thing - The Kings of Hip Hop

At it again, Germany's Rapster Records puts together a curious double CD called "Kings Of Hip Hop;"curious in that one of the CDs should be called Kings of Old Skool Seventies Jazz or Soul. These double disc collections force your dear critic to take "sides" just for fun; especially when they are so divergently different.

DJ Premier, (of Guru Gangstarr fame); your preeminence, you obviously didn't understand that this is supposed to be Kings of Hip Hop, and not Soul. So your selections need explaining in the liner notes or sumthin'. They are more typical of seventies soul. "Did he pick the faves of the elders around him as he grew up?" I ask. On the other hand, I am glad to have some fresh digital copies of what he chose. On the website, I got some insight. He, "the established king," will mix what shaped Hip-Hop. I would counter by asking "who are the Rappers that shaped Hip-Hop?" You picked Jazz artists, dude! The assignment may well be like whatever happened to Special Ed - now I think I know.

Mr. Thing, formerly of the Scratch Perverts, on the other disc, paid attention in class, and gets a "hundred" (as we used to say) - "pencils down." Duo kudos to Rapster Records for unearthing jams some of us may have, err, misplaced, like Brand Nubian's "Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down," ODB's "Brooklyn Zoo" (shame on ya, yo ol' dirty bastard), and one of my first answering machine jams (that my lame friends at the time didn't understand), Black Moon's "I Got Cha Opin" with the Barry White sample in background... Mr. Thing, yes, yes y'all.

In my opinion, Hip-Hop was born from James Brown-type soul that we used to hear on Boston's WILD AM, or New York City's WWRL AM. The technology of sampling enabled the new genre to be less original when it came to composing, and surprisingly that did not hurt it. If Disco shaped Dance/House of today, then my algebraic equation reads Soul=Rap=Hip-Hop.

Mr. Thing, it is a love thang on the website where they list more tracks than actually on the CD. I admire the fact that he chose two from money-makin' Mt. Vernon's Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth. Maybe he could have coached DJ Premier, whose selections of the moment seem to be just that... I will say that "Men Are Getting Scarce" is a great choice, but not inspiring of Hip-Hop.

BBE's mission statement is 'real music for real people' and while that is not exactly original, they seem to be staying true the game. It is amusing that BBE also stands for "barely breaking even" - gee, I wish I'd have thought of that!