Howdy, this is Wane “Snapback” Lietoc, noted cassette enthusiast, mountain of text-poster, and the latest in a string of individuals brave enough to come back for yet another college try with kickstarting a HHH rate. One taking us WAY back to a long long time ago, about 33-36 years ago to be precise…

The first decade of recorded hip-hop is akin to watching the train tracks get built while sitting in the train itself. What had started as a way to capture a manufactured snippet of an all-night bronx blacktop jam had jettisoned into a burgeoning canon of rappers, scratchers, producers, tastemakers, and EVEN breaks n’ drum machines in search of the perfect beat. Planet Rock had made it clear that hip-hop’s future was one based in technology, like the Roland TR-808, although mid-school’s lumbering DEF beats and hulking 12’s could only last for so long. No longer was there a need to hire a musician to play a bass line or a need to program a drum machine to play a weird memory of a 70s break classic in DJ rotation. With the introduction of rudimentary sampling methodologies (and later the technology) by ’85-86, a massive shift in how hip-hop was going to be built up was coming into focus alongside a huge new class of (New York) hip hop groups.

WELCOME TO SAMPLER ORIENTED DEBUTS ’87-90!

GRAB BALLOT HERE (+ BACK UP PASTEBIN)

Rate due late September TBD

Today’s contestants are none other than landmark debut albums, Paid in Full, Critical Beatdown, 3 Feet High and Rising, and People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm! (Sorry It Takes a Nation…you’re actually the second PE album!). All landmarks in hip-hop flows, storytelling, and sampling to create a slicker vision beyond mid-school drum machines and hardcore machinations. Let’s meet the contestants now! (folks, I do go long so feel free to skip to the rules below!)

Eric B. and Rakim – Paid in Full

As soon as we heard the 12″ of I Know You Got Soul we knew Yo! Bum Rush the Show was irrelevant. Rakim was like a fleet Muhammad Ali under the beat. We listened to it all day when the single first came out.

Chuck D, in a recount of hearing “I Know You Got Soul” for the first time in 1987

Kid Wiz (soon to be Rakim) claimed to have studied and mastered the techniques of three of the old-school: Melle Mel, Grandmaster Caz, and Kool Moe Dee. He was already crafting debut album material in high school halls. By 1985, Eric Barrier was working as a DJ at New York City radio station WBLS, rooming with Marley Marl, and looking for “the best MC” to rap over his turntable work. The duo weren’t close friends, but they had a kinetic potential. Especially when they hit the studio in ’86 to record Eric B. is President. Suddenly they were rolling with Rush Management and signed to 4th and Broadway. It was time to get Paid in Full.

Produced by Eric B. and Rakim, with Marley Marl also involved (while basically playing with new tech), & written and recorded in MASSIVE haste, Paid in Full eventually did go platinum! Just not before completely rewiring what hip-hop was and what is was to be about. James Brown samples that were slick and renewed hip-hop’s funk bite. Rhyme structure that FLOWED like Muhammad Ali. A never-ending desire to rap solely about self-actualization and fulfillment (while also sounding exceptionally hard & with immense detailed storytelling)—just what is “knowledge” on this album? Amongst it a series of rules as serious as cancer: Check out my melody. Move the crowd. Show that you got soul. You ain’t a joke. All in service of getting paid in full because hip hop is the only business you know. This album is sparse in its space between samples, drums, mid-end, and Rakim’s voice—the kind corroding into the red during vocal takes; this all never once sounding like anything but a novum into the future. Paid in Full is an album about survival, one that still stands today even as the times that made the album have all but faded away.

Tis the leanest album here by a country mile. 9 cuts PLUS the [Coldcut remix of Paid in Full]((https://imgur.com/a/22pLzpY)) in lieu of Extra Beat; you’ll thank me later.

Ultramagnetic MCs – Critical Beatdown

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Ultramgnetic MCs: to boldly go where no other rapper has gone before; to examine the universe and reconstruct the style of today’s hip-hop culture

Ultramagnetic MCs’ Space Groove 1984 demo

Fish it ain’t my favorite dish

Kool Keith, taking a shot at Rakim on “Kool Keith Housing Things”

Ced-Gee had access to a EMU SP1200, let’s get that straight. He’d learn to use it from Keyboard Money Mike, an R&B producer and VP of B-Boy Records. But before all that Keyboard Money Mike had convinced Ced-Gee to properly form a street crew, Ultramagnetic MCs. They were b-boys in the early 80s before evolving beyond the dances and into MC’ing and production by ’84 proper with their demo. Kool Keith taught Ced-Gee how to rap. Ced-Gee taught DJ Moe Luv how to DJ. And Trevor Randolph, TR Love, showed up and rounded out the group. But Ced-Gee had access to that EMU SP1200 sampler, and Kool Keith had both a vocabulary no one could touch and a flow that YEARNED for a street battle.

Ced-Gee would make his mark on work for Boogie Down Production’s Criminal Minded & in an unspecified capacity on Paid in Full’s beats. All while Ultramagnetic MCs had the only other forward thinking single of 1986 this side of Eric B. is President: Ego Trippin’. It’d arrive remixed almost two years later on Critical Beatdown, their proper debut. At over 15 track just shy of 47 minutes, Critical Beatdown seems to repeatedly jettison out of the 80s and to ’91 or ’92 with no problem. Ced-Gee’s knowledge of the SP1200 led to the concoction of hyper fixated, choppy but minimalist sampling that fucking jittered perfectly against Kool Keith’s finessed delivery. Under a mountain of James Brown abrasion, Keith took battle rhyming towards a surrealist pop culture meeting between (as one writer would call it) “Richard Pyror, Larry Flynt, and Joantahn Winters”, and Keith is clearly trying to one up Rakim consistently through the album in evolved, flexuous forms. It is quite frankly the most ballsy rhyming of the 80s outside a Ricky D story. That the album is overshadowed is more a testament to the strength of the Hip Hop Class of 1988 (even Public Enemy were taking notes when they made It Takes a Nation; note the PE shoutout & shared samples). But that doesn’t hide the fact that the what these 4 accomplished against the limits of sampling technology is consistently ripe for rediscovery. No time like right here and right now.

De La Soul – 3 Feet High and Rising

“I came in to buy U2. I left with De La Soul”

Tommy Boy Promotional Advertisement for 3 Feet High and Rising

Our first two albums are handily HARD hitting NYC borough classics. But eventually, the music was going to matriculate outside of the boroughs, towards the middle-class suburbs, and likely to regional scenes outside the fledgling Philadelphia’s DJ oriented zone or LA’s post-electro gangsta era. If there’s an album the scholars and historians will point to as ground zero for that, it’s De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, which is finally on streaming and properly reissued as of this spring.

3 Feet High and Rising is a lot of things. Hip-hop historian, Jeff Chang, wrote the ultimate analysis and overview of the album in 2018 for Pitchfork’s Sunday Review, and it’d be redundant to go all out on this. But there are 3 things you should know. 1) It is the debut of Kelvin “Posdnous” Mercer, Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Pasemaster Mase” Mason, alongside the magnanimous one-of-a-kind DJ Paul “Prince Paul” Huston (of Stetsasonic). All 4 kids from Long Island (itself a fertile zone where PE, Rakim, KMD, and Biz Markie emerged) who went to Amityville Memorial High and had a kinetic energy that only Kool Keith could match; they also knew their pop culture and had parents who loved calypso, jazz, and rnb records. 2) 3 Feet High and Rising was recorded for $25,000 in two months in 1988 before its March 1989 release, with the gang learning gear in real time while digging deeper to one up each other. Everyone and their mom liked the album (no literally, my 61 year old mom loves this album now). The only thing anyone didn’t like was the DAISY age aesthetic, soon to be killed off by De La Soul is Dead!

3) 3FT High caps the first decade of recorded hip hop by presenting what was always known in the b-boy/dj/mc battles but couldn’t be made apparent to a mass pop crossover audience: hip-hop is language, a modes of communication owned by those who bring themselves to it. It just had never sounded so…left-field and weird, so personal (lotta girls!) and yet progressive, the kind that was not just rooted in Five Percenters or Afrocentric ideology, but in new ways of recasting adolescence and moving up in the scene. Prince Paul hadn’t just sampled standard funk, but the fluff of soft rock, lounge, and even 60s pop, drawing major connections through pop music while begging a question about the nature of recorded music and how things could be in conversation with another outside of labels. None of the three MCs here seem to be interested in a def street battle with their contemporaries. I mean hell, they put the album framed in (an actually funny, and cohesively working) giant surreal game show that didn’t give you the answers but sure as hell was entertaining, begging to ask just what the point was. But it worked! Because 3 Feet High and Rising all amounts to a brilliantly novel sonic Bildungsroman. The kind that’d 90s hip-hop would have ample space to explore with, even as the album’s sampling woes left it out of print for decades too long. Eye know y’all won’t resist a chance to come out and give it proper justice.

Note: 1) The spotify version is not the original. There is no harm nor foul listening to what you can access here, but if you have an OG version, it is recommended. 2) In order to better organize the listen, while preserving the merits of the skits, you’ll notice in the ballot that MANY skits have been tacked on as part of a song. However, De La Orgee, has been removed on account of no one needing to assign a numerical value to this!

A Tribe Called Quest – People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm

“I am Q-Tip from a group called quest”

Q-Tip’s original, pre-edited introduction lyric on Jungle Brothers’ 1988 cut “The Promo” from their debut

The album is a voyage to the land of positive vibrations, and each new cut is a new experience. With sophisticated production invoking a jazz flavor, Tip’s mellow smooth rhymes become the cushion for a trip through hip-hop heaven…and one wonders what Jive had in their ears when they chose the first singles. Any way you cut it though, the album is way in there

The Source’s first 5-mic review (for a debut nonetheless!)

The collective didn’t have a name per se, but there was a like-mindedness. A networking of sorts was taking place in ’88. First, the Jungle Brothers would meet and invite a talented teenager, Kamaal Ibn John Fareed, in to record with them. Afrika Bam Bam would christen him Q-Tip and urge him to change his introductory lyric; tribe sounded more finessed after all. Not too long after producing a cut and guest versing on another, the Jungle Brothers would urge Q-Tip to come and meet De La Soul; a new vibe was emerging and everyone seemed in lockstep (Q-Tip would even cameo in a black hoodie in the Me, Myself, and I music video & was invited to their home-studio to see the equipment and even tinker with it)! Jungle Brothers and De La Soul were the main ringleaders in those early days, but Q-Tip and his Tribe Called Quest were something of young rabble rousers; and by “Buddy” on 3 Feet High…, the Native Tongues collective seemed to emerge as a posse. Desperate to find a home on any label. Jive was the only one that seemed to want to take them in.

That all being said, it still took half a decade for People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm to go gold. The album stands out amongst the class of 1990 and in the Tribe catalog for being basically a Q-Tip solo album of his pause tape sampling methodology (which he’d been developing since at least 1985 at the age of 15) emerging as a deft way of conveying a new, fleet footed vibe. Don’t let the cover art or inserts fool you proper; only Q-Tip and DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad were signed proper to the group. Childhood friend Phife Dawg is here for a few verses (when not sneaking off to a Knicks game), but they’re written by Q-Tip. As is pre-culinary school Jarobi White who almost formed a duo proper with Phife Dawg. But the vision for where Tribe could go, as well as what 90s Hip Hop could entail, was starting to come into focus. It was here where Q-Tip continued a conversation De La Soul had started and pondered a new inquiry: “Could a beat be both def and beautiful?” Well raters, can you kick it?

BONUS! ’86-’90 Sample Oriented Singular Cuts!

Hey it’s a bonus rate! Neat! Here’s the deal: you can leave scores 1-10, no 0, no 11. you can fill out as much or as little as you want! The goal was just to shed a light on NINE (some of these are long, goodness gracious) of the era’s fantastic singles. You might recognize a few of the Def Jam players (and in the case of 3rd Bass, you might recognize a VERY young MF DOOM having his first major exposure). You might be familiar with the Bridge/South Bronx battle of ’86-’87. You might even be familiar with a different kind of hip-hop sampling tradition was starting to emerge but running parallel in the UK. But if you’re not? Well I invite you to come in and sample these cuts and leave scores!

MC Shan – The Bridge:

Boogie Down Productions – South Bronx:

M/A/A/R/S – Pump Up the Volume:

The Justified Ancient of Mu Mu – Downtown:

Slick Rick – Children’s Story:

Public Enemy – Don’t Believe the Hype:

3rd Bass – The Gas Face (ft. Zev Love X, aka MF DOOM):

Beastie Boys – Shake Ya Rump:

Biz Markie – Just a Friend:

I LOVE THESE ALBUM AND SINGULAR CUTS… BUT WHAT ARE RATES AGAIN?

Rates are a subreddit game in which a user scores a group of songs on a scale from 1-10, with each individual also given a single 11 and a single 0 to be used exactly once per rate. They will then message their ballot to the rate host, who will tally up all the points and then reveal the final results over a weekend, eliminating songs one by one until the last track remaining wins the rate and bragging rights forever.

For more info here, r/popheads put together a helpful video; while some of the info applies specifically to the way popheads do their rates, the overall format is similar. With that out of the way, here’s some more things to know:

You must listen to and score every song in the rate. Ballots with missing scores will not be accepted. Your scores must be on a scale from 1 to 10 and can include one decimal place but no more. So 7.3 is fine but 7.31 is not. You may give one song in the whole rate a score of 11 and one other a score of 0 so, if you want to award these scores, save them for your favorite and least favorite songs in the rate. We’d encourage you to leave comments of your general thoughts or reasoning behind your scores on any songs you wish (or just shitpost – whatever’s clever). If you choose to do so however, they must be in this format, simply leaving one space after your score:

Paid in Full: 10 Fish?! A favorite dish so true bestie rakim!

Any other format such as:

Kool Keith Housing Things: Black Elvis, Kool Keith, YIMBY confirmed?!?! (7.9)

De La Orgee: 1: Wait this isn’t even in the rate?!

will get your ballot rejected.

Your ballot must be formatted exactly like the template in the message link so make sure you use it or the template in the backup pastebin for your scores to be accepted. Your scores will not be confidential and will be revealed, along with any comments, with your username attached. DO NOT SABOTAGE the rate by giving outrageously low/high scores for the sole purpose of skewing the results, we reserve the right to exclude any ballot we suspect of this. If you’re worried your scores could be mistakenly perceived as such, all you need to do is leave comments explaining the reasoning behind them. If you want to change any of your scores or comments after you’ve already submitted your ballot, feel free to message me before the deadline either here on reddit, or our Discord usernames darjeelingdark#4047 and seanderlust#5763

In case you missed it

DEADLINE LATE SEPTEMBER TBD

LINK TO SUBMIT SCORES (+ BACK UP PASTEBIN)

Rate Playlist

YouTube (recommended for music videos + KLF) | Spotify | Tidal

Questions:

What do you predict will be Top 5 of the rate? Which album will last the shortest? What do you think will be the first song out, so the worst song? Which group do you think is most overrated here? Most underrated? Is Fish Your Favorite Dish?

Looking forward to seeing how y’all approach this one. much love <3