Deep, soulful Drum & Bass

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When this came out it spun me out

For a while I think I had the gears in friction in my head trying to figure exactly what lineage trip hop fit into and I think it was tracks like Tricky Kid that got me thinking along the lines that trip hop might foundationally be an offshoot of Dancehall. When I think of the particular kinds of sound-twisting that gets employed in Trip Hop that make a lot of it so unique that parallel also jumps out although it's handled a little bit different, ie. UK shaped, formed, and reinterpreted.


Very cool. It's fascinating what kinds of doors music and open for us. I grew up in a suburban area and in my childhood was strictly a grunge and thrash-metal kid. I hated hip hop at the time but I think a large part of that had to do with these white kids with wealthy parents trying to thug out to it. I was starting to reevaluate a bit by highschool when Wu Tang Forever came out but hearing so many good dashes of it in solid drum n bass tracks really opened the door for me to go back and check out the whole back log of golden age stuff that I'd missed out on. Mobb Deep Hell on Earth was probably one of my favorites that I simply wouldn't have known about otherwise if I'd stayed on that track.


Here's the challenge - most of that used to be on mix tapes. There have been a few store bought albums that had MCing on them but they didn't often have quite the kind your looking for. I know Blame's Progression Sessions had, I have to be careful here, a guy named DRS (I'm pretty sure he's a different DRS from the one who's around right now), flowing over the mix. Soul Slinger's United DJ's of America 14 had TC Izlam through most of it. Similarly Hive had an album mix of his own work called Raw Uncut which also had TC Izlam.

For whatever reason it doesn't seem like many store bought albums kept the MC'ing. It could perhaps be that they were worried, thinking major record labels in the past, that it was too separate an element at the time or that it would make the albums not sell as well. I know some people find MC'ing annoying and they could have been that loud a minority at the time that they sold most people on the idea of not having it on there? What I don't understand quite as well is how often double cds were released where one would be the unmixed tracks, one would be the same tracks (maybe a few extra) mixed, why not throw MCing on the mixed disc? It seems like Metalheadz has never done that (its always been without the MC's) and yeah, Goldie - the label's head - is also another example of a brilliant musician and thinker all around who has half-Jamaican heritage so as far as I can tell, in the UK at least, this wasn't one of those weird uncultured exec decisions.