skykicking

I've not yet listened to it enough to pronounce upon its greatness or otherwise (on first listen I'm going with "pretty good") but it annoys me that the Big Dada label compilation Extra Yard is being billed as presenting this grand new sound - 'bouncement' - that supposedly combines hip hop, garage and dancehall into a thrilling new genre-busting superstyle. What they mean is that it's dancehall flavoured hip hop, which has a high likelihood of being great, but is hardly anything new; at any rate I've yet to hear any dancehall/rap fusions as consummate and enjoyable as those on Foxy Brown's last album.

If you want a great UK hip hop compilation, I reiterate my recommendation of Plus One's Champion Sounds comp put out by DMC a few months ago. More populist than Extra Yard, to be sure, but that's precisely why it's superior. Plus it's more energetic, more diverse, more plain fun. Plus it features the only "true" "bouncement" group that I know of, namely Fallacy & Fusion, whose "The Groundbreaker" actually does rather cleverly dissolve hip hop, dancehall and garage into eachother (and don't even get me started on Fallacy & Plus One's fan-fucking-tastic "Special").

But why do we really need a garage/rap fusion when that fusion is already happening in garage anyway? With its squelchy synths, martial rhythm and scary scary baritone toasting, Flo Dan's "Big Mic Man" is as convincing a stab at raggafied UK hip hop as anything New Flesh have done (no, more convincing, no matter how much I like "Lie Low" or "More Fire"), but psychically it occupies the space of garage - hard, fast, unpretentious. Which is not to say the garage-rap renders UK hip hop irrelevant or obsolete (the latter is too frequently great and inventive for that) but rather that garage certainly doesn't need saving by the hip hop cognoscenti.

- 4:00 PM 0 comments

0 Comments: