Who Da Boss?

1. Jay-Z - Hola Hovito
2. Clipse - Stuntin' Y'all
3. Slim Thug - Like A Boss
4. Nikka Costa - Like A Feather
5. Timbaland - Give It To Me ft. Nelly Furtado & Justin Timberlake
6. The Vivians - Dr. Doctor Dr. Doctor
7. Justin Timberlake - My Love ft. T.I.
8. Shiny Toy Guns - Le Disko
9. Lyrics Born - Bad Dreams
10. Mr. Vegas - Heads High
11. Rage - Run To You
12. Roots Manuva - Witness (1 Hope)
13. Twisted Sister - I wanna Rock
14. Spank Rock - Backyard Betty

Malcy, Blair and myself. 2 days. 1 van. Thousands of copies of The Skinny music magazine. And 4 records. August 2006. What a time to be alive.

I was unemployed, back living at my dad's, on the dole. A disgrace. Malcy I think was also unemployed but may have been making a living playing poker at that point. Also a disgrace.  Blair was, I think, doing some work at The Skinny and was maybe working part time at The Southern. A shining example.

The people at the magazine had asked Blair if he knew anyone who would be up for getting a van with him and delivering the new issue to various establishments over the next few days for a small fee. Naturally he thought of us. He asked. We agreed.

Sophomore solo records from both Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake had just leaked. Possibly the day before. Already Platinum by Houston rapper Slim Thug was still in heavy rotation a year after it's release. And Chamillionaire was enjoying a lot of radio airplay with his hit single Ridin' Dirty ft. Krayzie Bone. Those tunes soundracked our stop n' drop tour of Edinburgh for those 48 hours.

Malcy tolerated Blair and I getting giddy as we got to know FutureSex/LoveSounds. My initial disappointment at the lack of any input from The Neptunes on the project dissipated quickly as it became clear that JT and Timbaland had crafted something quite special for this record. The odd influences of southern rap, Prince, Coldplay and (obviously) Michael Jackson can be heard all over the record. What Goes Around.../...Comes Around an early favourite but it's My Love that has really endured. The video is one of my favorite pop videos of all time. The camera moves, the framing, the choreography, the lighting, the styling, the editing. It's fucking beautiful. Director Paul Hunter smashed it.

Anyway, B'Day got a few spins but no one else was as excited about it as I was. I still think it's her best album. It's concise, flab free, has killer production (including 2 brilliant Neptunes joints), vocals typically on point, some of her best hooks and short on syrupy ballads. What's not to like? But that isn't really relevant here. Neither is Ridin' Dirty. A completely irrelevant total jam.

 
Already Platinum was more or less disowned by Slim Thug when the involvment of Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo on more than half of the tracks production didn't translate into massive sales. Regardless the dirty south gangsta rap of the record was hard. Obviously it's even more heavily indepted to the southern rap of the likes of UGK and Three 6 Mafia and the chopped and screwed stylings of DJ Screw than the JT one, but it was given that Neptunes pop sheen here. Mostly it is awesome. And exactly what was required on this mini (van) odyssey. Like the absolute goofballs we are, by the third play through when Click Clack came on we each had mime guns of different models to pretend to reload each time the sound effect appeared during the songs chorus. Passing cars chuckled at our nonsense.

It's crazy that just seeing My Love and Like A Boss on the same tracklisting instantly reminds me of these 2 days. Either track separately would make me think of other moments or people but the association between the 2 takes me straight back to that van like a time machine. It could have been almost any track from each album too and the effect would've been the same.

My Love and Like A Boss though, each produced by some of hip hop and pops most important ever producers, couldn't be more different. My Love with it's stuttering, swirling synths, human beatboxing, a dragged out cymbal shimmer and some kind of weird maniacal, mechanical giggle, Timbaland uses a lot of different sounds but puts a lot of space between them. It ends up sounding minimal despite how much is going on in it. It feels like a cold embrace. Like A Boss on the other hand is all bombast. Chad Hugo's obnoxious tuba, the marching band beat, an even more obnoxious lady screaming about how much of a boss Thugga is in the background of the chorus and the stabbing synthesized strings. Like the rest of the album there is a really aggressive air around it. The Neptunes do menace and it's a blast.

Coincidentally an earlier song on this compilation makes me think of a moment with Blair as well. Opener Hola Hovito, another Timbaland production from one of Jay-Z's (and hip hop's) best ever albums, reminds me of a discussion we had in probably about 2002. Blair wasn't sold on Jigga as an artist, what he'd heard hadn't impressed him, so I lent him The Blueprint in an effort to convert him. It worked but he told me that it was only after hearing Hola Hovito that he was convinced.

It's likely that I didn't put this particular mix CD together until probably November 2006, by which time I was working at The Southern and World Famous had already gone walkies down to London which would explain the reappearance of both The Vivians - Dr. Doctor Dr, Doctor and Shiny Toy Guns - Le Disko. It would also explain why the version of Timabaland's Give It To Me ft. Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake is the early demo version that leaked online around that time.

Most of the rest of this mix is fairly cohesive with the exception of 2 tracks. I suppose I Wanna Rock by Twisted Sister has some loose kinship with the glam punk rock of The Vivians, Run To You by Rage by comparison is a real curveball. A mid-ninties dance-pop cover of a Bryan Adams song seems like a really random choice. I Wanna Rock can at least be explained by the fact I was playing a lot of Vice City at the time. I have no idea where the Rage came from. Belter though.

Elsewhere Nikka Costa appears with her Mark Ronson produced 2001 single Like A Feather. I still feel like even though it was a hit and used in many ads and TV shows, this really is an under - celebrated ditty. I remember it would occasionally get dropped through in the back room at Motherfunk when it was at The Honeycomb. Probably by Spectrum. The ascending/decending bass line, the hand claps in the chorus, the strange distortion on her massive voice, nice jangly guitars, ?uestlove on the sticks. It's really great. Roughly half of her debut album and the same of her sophomore effort are excellent. The rest is fairly disposable.

Stuntin' Y'all is taken from the Re-Up Gang mixtape We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 1 and is another Neptunes production. Pusha and Malice of Clipse ride a beat made up of a bright sounding glockenspiel and a  propulsive synth line, as though it comes as natural to them as breathing. The brothers explain in detail how slinging crack supports their shine. The dark and the light. There is a nice and atmospheric middle-eight which helps to illustrate this dichotomy. Pharrell's ad-libbed 'Oooooh's at the back of the incredibly catchy chorus act as the songs real hook though. Wonderful and under-appreciated stuff

Spank Rock's Backyard Betty is still filthy, electro-rap fun and Roots Manuva's Witness (One Hope) is still an absolute classic (what a video too). But Lyrics Born is a name that takes me back to my late teens to early twenties self when I was all about backpack, conscious hip-hop and definitely not into any of that 'mainstream, commercial shit'. I was first aware of his name when he appeared on the Quannum Spectrum album in '99 around which time Jurassic 5 and Dilated Peoples would also have been in getting a lot of spins. Bad Dreams is taken from his 2003 album Later That Day and still sounds like the not quite as good younger brother of the sublime I Changed My Mind from the aforementioned Quannum album.

It's interesting that on this compilation it is immediately followed by a song that takes me back to the very next step of my relationship or evolution with hip-hop and rap music. Heads High by Mr. Vegas transports me to the now dead and gone club Establishment on Semple Street where drinks were 50p on a Thursday and £1 on the weekends. Bumpin' and grindin' to bangers like this completely changed my perspective on all that 'mainstream, commercial shit'. I realised that rap and hip-hop could also soundtrack a party and be about fun and drinking and sex and didn't always have to be a sermon. I realised that there was plenty of space for both kinds of rap to exist and sometimes it was even okay for them to overlap. I could listen to the label mates on Stones Throw in my bedroom and the latest Nelly record in the club. And that was okay. Before that time I turned my nose up at anything that wasn't hippy-hip-hop like A Tribe Called Quest or politically charged like Public Enemy or hard gangsta rap like Wu-Tang Clan or somewhere in between like NaS. I was a bit of a snob about it basically and it felt good to grow up and embrace the fun.

Years later that development allowed me to have a blast with my mates in a van while jamming to the last Slim Thug record. What a time indeed.