Top 10 most slept on albums cross genre
This is a big giant incredibly subjective post that after long thought, I have decided to break up and update. Seems like the only way to do it. Here goes…
You ever had an album by a band you loved but none of your friends did? Maybe it was the second or third album of a really popular band but no one but you paid attention to it? Or it’s the album before or after the album that came out and straight up smashed everything? I’ve been trying to pinpoint which number it is but the exact album seems to be random for each group I’ve chosen.
A great point for us to start with is A Tribe Called Quest. Tribe started in 1989 for me with the remix for Buddy by De la Soul. I was like, “Huh, who’s this Q-Tip guy? That’s a weird name Q-Tip. And his voice is crazy. Did he just say McGuillicuddy? Who raps like that?” My interest was piqued.
Not long after that someone gave me a tape of the first Tribe Album and I was hooked. (Back in the olden days we used to have these things called “cassette tapes”. They were these real world physical things that contained your favorite music. They weren’t nebulous like the Internet. The main downside to tapes though, was that to get to your favorite song you had to fast forward until you reached the song you wanted to hear. Whirrrrrr. Fast Forwarding could take 30 actual seconds. Yeah I know 30 seconds! If your favorite cut was deep on the album, (we can discuss album bloat and how the CD was the cause of that on another post) you were SOL. I won’t say I could relate to everything a bunch of guys from Queens, New York were about but their vibe meshed with mine and I was a die-hard. Now days there are so many names for fans of their music, backpackers, cerebral, (blah, blah, blah on labels!) but I was just happy to hear something I could nod my head to. Maybe even smile god forbid.
But back to my initial point, must stay on topic. So after the phenomenal success of The Low End Theory, pretty quickly by hip hop standards, Tribe came back with Midnight Marauders. Midnight Marauders seems to be in response to accusations from the gangsta rap coalition that Tribe was too soft. All this coincided with their infamous rap beef with Wrexx-n-Efxx. I love rap beefs. Sometimes they bring out the best in each rapper. Like Nas totally came alive after his rap beef with Jay-Z. He had been wallowing in that lame ass Cristal Crap as I call it when he got called out by Jay-Z. It seemed to revive him. His last three albums have been absolutely amazing. God’s Son was inspired and Hip-Hop is Dead was a classic in my opinion, ironically, probably not though, it included a joint track with the man who revived him Jay-Z.
It just occurred to me that Tribe also made one of my all time favorite songs in Hot Sex (On a Platter). This song was on the Boomerang soundtrack which was mostly forgettable. I like that song so much I stole the tape from my Dad (sorry!)
By the way, this is something that I would love to hear your opinion on.
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