Hip Hop and Breakz

It has been eleven years sine Dave, Maseo and Posdnous blessed us with an album and the world is a very different place to what it was when they released the Grind Date in 2004.  As a way of allowing the Plugs complete freedom this album was funded via Kickstarter with De La offering a wide range of rewards for fans who backed their 8th studio album.  The creative process behind this was project was handled entirely by De La allowing them to take total control of the growth of this project.  The approach is unique certainly to De La and possibly the genre itself.   The funds gathered from the Kickstarter process was used to hire a strong group of talented musicians, The Rhythm Roots Allstars and the group embarked on months of jam sessions that were recorded and then sampled as opposed to the traditional Hip Hop route that the group had followed in the past. De La recorded over two hundred hours of music with a collective of LA based...

Twelve Reasons to Die is the tenth studio album from founding Wu Tang Clan member Ghostface Killah. It is a concept album based on a comic book of the same name, it is based around Ghostface Killah's alter ego, Tony Starks as he reads the comic and writes songs to it.  The story is set in 1960s Italy, in which Starks fights against a crime organization, falls in love with the kingpin’s daughter, and seeks revenge when he is murdered. The album is entirely produced and composed by Adrian Younge, and executive produced by the RZA. The album was released on April 16, 2013 by the RZA's Soul Temple record label. It is a relatively short album made up of 12 tracks and coming in at just under forty minutes. Ghostface has been my favourite Wu member since he dropped his first solo album prior to that he was really just another background voice on the multitude of Wu albums. With Ironman I really started to take notice of Ghost but Supreme Clientelle I became a major Ghostface fan an...

Killer Mike made his debut on Outkast’s legendary Stankonia album back in 2000 before appearing on one of my favourite Outkasts track a year later ‘The Whole world’. Since then he has gone on to release five solo albums on the Grind Time Official label. To some he is an Atlanta legend appearing on tracks with Outkast, T.I., Bun B, Young Jeezy and other Dirty South legends. He has often presented a more eloquent view of rapping touching on such diverse subjects as politics, religion and the plight of the poorer members of our society. Although I usually would not take more than a passing interest in most of Mike’s catalogue, apart from a few of the more interesting songs, I immediately became interested when I heard his latest album would be produced entirely by El-P. The reason why this made it an interesting project is that although El-P and Killer Mike are from different sides of the Hip Hop landscape. However over time the Indie NY scene and the Dirty South ATL scene have ...