Fake For Real

The endless bursts of a machine gun. The horrific screams of a panicking women. Crescendos built with the help of booming synthesizers. Martial choruses. All of these played very loudly. And also, most importantly, the raspy and enraged voice of Gunplay himself, rapping in a breathless way, as if today was his last day. Those who assumed that nothing could be more extreme than the brutal Inglorious Bastard, he released in 2011, were completely wrong. The song "Jump Out" is insane, it is just utter madness. It goes beyond anything heard before.

So many years later, the bizarre and indigestible Pyramidi is just a distant memory, some remainder of the early 2000's and the short-lived abstract hip-hop era represented by labels such as Mush and Anticon. And though, and though… it aged much better that so many other records released by the same time by similar minded artists.

What made the difference between Good Things and other revivalist initiatives of the same kind, was Aloe Blacc's ability to update a well-known formula in an almost imperceptible way. It was, also, his superior feeling for music, which he developed by learning to play "real" instruments. It was thanks to these, and many other details, that Aloe proved that nu soul could be, at times, something much better than a tasteless old recipe for aging folks.

In the year 2000, the Micranots made an impression with Obelisk Movements, a record full of hallucinated and apocalyptic undie rap they had released under Bigg Jus' sponsorship, on his Sub Verse label. This had not been their first album, tough. As early as in the mid-90's, I Self Devine (MC) and Kool Akiem (DJ) had already recorded the Return of the Travellahs cassette, which easily bears the comparison with their later record.

We could find anything on Peanut Butter Wolf's first LP, in fact more a compilation than a regular album. All the styles of the times had found a place, there. "Straight in your face" or more mature kinds of raps, creative beats, experiments, old school accents ("Keep On Rockin It" with the late Charizma), and allusions to the ancients, starting with the title, derived from Public Enemy's "My Uzi Weighs a Ton". And lots of turntablism: "Casio", with Babu, "Phonies", with DJ Design, and most of all the colossal "Tale of Five Cities", created by no less than 11 DJs (Beat Junkies, X-Ecutioners, Cut Chemist, Kid Koala).