Crate Digging 3 - Hip Hop Remixes Live from New York feat. Mobb Deep, Busta Rhymes....

Back in the summer of 1996 (which is almost twenty years ago, damn I feel old) there were all sorts of dodgy remixes and bootlegs floating around.  This here piece of vinyl is a perfect example of this sub-genre.  Someone has managed to get hold of a few a capellas and have made up their own beats for these tracks that were everywhere that year.  I probably picked these up in Uptown Records where I bought a lot bootlegs that year.  Although there were plenty of these bootlegs around at that time the cheap music creation apps like Garageband and Fruity loops had not yet come into existence and making tracks like this actually required access to high end music software like Q-Base and some actual hardware.

All of the tracks on this EP are produced by a dude called Funkmaster Frankenstein who soon after dropped the Funkmaster and went onto produced some nice underground head nodders throughout the 90s and well into the 2000s.  The first track is Frankenstein's Woo-Hah remix which is as you would expect a bouncy track with a nice off kilter organ riff for the Busta Rhymes a cappella to blend into.  Not really an improvement on the original but a slightly different more mellow version.  The Masta I.C. remix is again a more mellow version than the original. With a soulful organ sample and a sporadic xylophone in the background this remix is more for the sunday afternoon in the park rather than the saturday night in the club.  The Danger remix is based around a sparse piano loop and features the same scratches as the original for the chorus, not a bad remix but really not a patch on the original.
Lastly we have Shook Ones part 3 which is my favourite track on this little EP.  It has more depth to it than the other three.  A simple track with nice piano loops providing what could almost be a Havoc produced track if it wasn't so upbeat musically.  Check the link below for the rip.
Straight up Shook Ones.