loosie: words: Album Reviews: Jazzy Jeff & Rhettmatic

Album Reviews: Jazzy Jeff & Rhettmatic

Remember when DJs didn't just put gunshots between songs?

by Douglas Passion | 2004.01.22

Let’s take a cripwalk down mixtape memory lane. In the antediluvian era of the 80’s and early 90’s, a good tape was judged not only by song selection, but also by the dexterity with which the DJ manipulated his records. Since everyone got records at around the same time, the only way for a DJ to separate himself from the competition was to have smoother blends, tighter cuts, more intricate scratches and more creative a cappella remixes than the next dude. It was a fine time to be a young man.

Then long-jawed DJ Clue came around. His skills were minimal, but his ability to procure exclusive unreleased material was peerless. Clue also liked to squeal his name (or a witty play on his moniker) over each and every song. He wasn’t the first DJ to yell out his handle, but he did usher in the era of the hyper-obnoxious self-shout-out. Not only did an echoing “Cluemanatiiiiiii” let everyone within earshot know that you were listening to a Clue tape, it also eliminated the need for a Hawaiian silky transition between songs. A decade later, mixtapes have explosions, gunshots and plenty of bellowing echoes…but very little actual mixing.

Seeing the hunger with which the public gobbled up the unreleased joints, labels rushed in to fuck everything up. There are armies of guys holed up in 1515 Madison Avenue skyscraper cubicles with spreadsheets, green visors and red pencils who have dedicated their lives to fucking everything up. And after a careful fucking-everything-up analysis, these soulless predators decided that they would start sending out straight-from-the-studio-DATs to favored DJs as a form of street-buzz promotion. It’s impossible to cut, scratch or blend a DAT, but even DJs who preferred fondling vinyl were forced to play the “hot shit” game. This practice rendered skills vestigial and helped to create a two-tier system in which some DJs got the exclusives and some were left out of the loop. If you had the right connections, you could move units, but not Technics platters. As the importance of connections burgeoned, our current mixtape climate emerged – a DJ is only as good as the exclusivity of his songs and the popularity of whichever rap crew is willing to give him cameo freestyles. It’s some powerful bullshit.

The return to the glory days of mixtapes is reliant on the effectiveness of those CD-turntables that people have spent the last decade hyping as the imminent deathblow for vinyl. If a DJ can get a CD straight from the label and get flexi with the tech as if wielding a vintage slab o’ vinyl, well, the means there will be no excuse for the lazy transitions. I’m placing my money on Green Lantern – based on his sickly intros and elaborate remixes, he seems to be the only big-name motherfucker who actually cares about craftsmanship. So Green, why don’t you get those CD turntables a’ whirling and flip the game on its over-inflated pumpkin head already?

While we’re waiting for that fateful day, we’ve got a pair of throwback mixtapes to review. You know, CDs where the DJs actually use – gasp -- records. The first is Jazzy Jeff’s Hip Hop Forever II, a collection of mid-Nineties East Coast favorites and a couple newer BBE releases. Most of the tracks are the kind of shit you hear at a sweatbox-sized L.E.S. lounge on a weekday night while you sip leisurely from a pint of Bass – O.C., a bunch of Boot Camp joints, some Tribe, a little Nas. Even though there are a few songs that are decisively non-classics, we’ll excuse BBE for slipping in a few tracks from the label’s homegrown talent. Besides, the star of the show here is Jazzy Jeff. The former partner of Willenium “Big Willie Style” Smith was always dope on the wheels, and, judging from the turntable chicanery he demonstrates on Hip Hop Forever II, Jeff hasn’t lost a beat. He gets busy without becoming one of those annoying DJ’s that you want to send to Saudi Arabia and accuse of stealing bread from an oil-slicked sheik. Swing, swing, swing and chop, chop, chop. I’m rambling about sheiks and shit, but the basic point is that there is a difference between what Jeff is giving you and a burned off CD of classic Hip-Hop MP3s. And since you’re probably heard 90% of the album’s material before, it doesn’t matter that Jeff’s prolonged cutting and juggling antics mean most of the songs are not played in their entirety. When it’s all said and done, Hip-Hop Forever II is fantastic record for shoving in the CD player when a whole bunch of your compadres come over to your lair with a couple bottles of foul Don Viejo rum and a fistful of Brazilian pornos to watch with the volume off.

Because I’m too lazy to reword it myself, I’m going to regurgitate the description of The Exclusive Collection right from the press material. So it’s “a showcase of handpicked artists on select songs made solely for this monumental double-disk album release.” Up Above Records has been releasing underground rap singles for a while, and they brought in Beat Junkie DJ Rhettmatic to twist them all together. Even if you’ve heard most of these songs (I hadn’t), only a serious vinyl collector is going to have a significant percentage of them lurking in his milkcrates. Other than a little intro where they say his name a few times in echoing stereo and a nice segment 18 tracks deep, Rhettmatic plays the sideline tighter than that filthy showboat Jazzy Jeff. He does some light cutting and a few nice mixes, but the album’s assemblage of relatively obscure songs is wisely left room to introduce itself. Unfortunately, the plague of lyrics about nothing that has long infected subterranean Hip-Hop again explodes out of remission like a pus-filled herpes shingle. Threaten someone, for fucking out loud. Call a bitch a whore or something. Even Diamond D’s lame ballerisms about how he constantly gets harangued by crowds of admirers intent on discovering the exotic fabric of his overcoat sound fresh in comparison to the generic “real Hip-Hop” drudgery that most of these cats kick. Notable exceptions are the Beatnut’s “Simple Murder”, Kool G Rap’s “Bout That” and Jaydee’s “Fuck the Police” – all of which stand apart from the crowd because they aren’t just rappin’ about rappin’. The Exclusive Collection is an enjoyable listen due to the front-to-back solid production and likable DJing of Rhettmatic, but the rambling emcees become grating about half way through. Oh yeah, big up to Sadat X for somehow sneaking in like seven appearances on the album and actually rhyming words together.