Rap Talk

Philly deejay Cosmo Baker has been busy of late; compiling mixes, dj’ing parties and touring.  That first activity seems to be taking up an ever greater amount of the performer’s time. That, though, only means Baker has been listening to a lot of music and wants to make folks dance to what’s in his head.

Each of these two mixes XXXplosive and Love Break are drastically different in concept, scope and purpose. The first has been compiled with the assistance of Pase Rock and Spankrock (so far all of these deejay names are kinda lame, but that doesn’t portend bad music).  XXXplosive is less concerned with atmosphere or overall cohesiveness. The mix, however, is made up of four tracks consisting of a number of disparate tunes mashed together to create a rather lackluster hip-hop outing.

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This is a weird one.

Held up by collectors for its scarcity and uniform approach to funk and soul music, Cleveland’s Hot Chocolate didn’t make it big. And neither did its front-man and guitarist, Lou Ragland – although he did tour with the Ink Spots for a short time during the eighties.

Hearing the self titled album – its only one – from Hot Chocoloate its curious that the same landscape gave birth to S.O.U.L. as well as a handful of relatively important punk groups. None of these acts share a tremendously apparent sound. But an artist, and we’ll assume that musicians count as artists, is charged with rendering his or her time and place in whatever medium is chosen. The difference between Hot Chocolate and S.O.U.L. is minimal – but those punk bands?

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The title of Exile’s latest long player is at once a throw back to early days as well as a proclamation of new fangled music distribution.

Named Radio AM/FM it’d be easy to simply understand the Los Angeles based producer to be commenting on the state of radio – past and present. The medium at one point worked as a child’s imagination, spitting out song after song by unseen performers. Anyone could be behind those notes, those harmonies and progressions. And with the expansion of FM radio in the seventies, there should have been an even greater wealth of music to discover. Of course, radio’s wound up being nothing but nonsense. And really, who wants to hear a pre-determined playlist, re-spun every few hours.

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Hearing Columbus dudes get air time around the turn of the millennium was truly amazing. It’d been the better part of a decade since Bone, Thugs ‘n Harmony did anything that folks paid attention to outside of Cleveland. And Columbus hadn’t exactly been churning out hits in the ensuing times. So, for MHz to gain a bit of momentum, RJD2 to get a record deal with a prestigious label, Copywrite head in the same direction and Camu Tao as well was all kind of inspiring. And while the expansion of the internet has been touted as giving random people the belief that their work, of whatever variety, to be heard. For me, it was this stuff. I hadn’t ever even entertained the notion of working out hip hop stuff (I still don’t), but in my life time there hadn’t ever been any sort of spotlight shined on the state I hailed from.

Along with all of this, illogic and Blueprint were kicking around. Heady times.

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