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Artist:
Fugees (Refugee Camp)
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List Price: £4.99
Our Price: £1.99
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Artist:
De La Soul
De La's debut represented a new path for hip-hop, a reaction to conventions that had turned into clichés. It was friendly and playful enough to cross over to a pop audience (thanks to Prince Paul's production, which found the funk hiding inside Steely Dan and "Schoolhouse Rock"), but complicated and tough enough to be hugely influential in the hip-hop world. Cryptic but ecstatic, and sometimes sexy (especially the ingenious double-entendre "Buddy"), Trugoy and Posdnuos's lyrics invented a "new style of speak," dense with self-invented slang and metaphors. The hits, including "Say No Go" and "Me Myself And I," are delightful, but the little sketches and sound-experiments ...
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List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £3.97
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Artist:
A Tribe Called Quest
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List Price: £5.99
Our Price: £2.72
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Artist:
Wu-Tang Clan
This debut revolutionized hip-hop (and launched half a dozen solo careers), as much for The RZA's raw barrage of off-kilter, off-key loops and sound effects as for its elliptically violent lyrics. Martial arts--at least as they appear in kung fu movies--are the Wu-Tang Clan's favorite metaphor, but they're also the organizing principle of the group, a crowd of eight rappers, each with his own way-out-there "fighting style." They created their own little self-contained culture, with its own symbols and shifting identities, and let listeners figure it out for themselves. Unless you're willing to immerse yourself in its world, it can be baffling and a little dry, but its agg...
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List Price: £5.99
Our Price: £3.64
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Artist:
Genius/GZA
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List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £3.19
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Artist:
Kanye West
College Drop Out, the debut from the most sought-after hip-hop producer not named Pharrell, delivers the unthinkable: West magically sledgehammers home his opinions on taboo topics over beats that are equally daring. The envelope-ripping beats shouldn't come as a surprise given that he's supplied the soundscapes to monster singles by everyone from Alicia Keys ("You Don't Know My Name") to Talib Kweli ("Get By"). What is freakish is that in West's world, rhymes about strippers, God, college life and guns can coexist tidily and not undermine each other. On "Breathe in Breathe Out" he raps "I gotta apologise to Mos and Kweli/ Is it cool to rap about gold if I told the...
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List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £2.74
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Artist:
Public Enemy
It Takes a Nation of Millions was the sign that hip-hop had exploded like a grenade. A rap record as abrasive, hard-core and eloquent as a Winston Churchill speech, the 1988 disc is one classic track after another: tense, multilayered, harmonically wild music. Chuck D declaims like a master preacher with foil Flavor Flav's voice darting around his. They have got the desperate energy of people fighting for their lives, and everything from their pumped-up rhetoric ("Prophets of Rage") to the group's quasi-paramilitary organisation, to the sirens and sax squeals in nearly every track declares how urgent their mission is. It is a hugely influential album, and it still ...
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List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £2.20
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Artist:
50 Cent
Stabbed, shot, assaulted and now with a million-dollar record deal, 50 Cent lives up to the title of his latest album Get Rich or Die Trying. The New York native comes from the same school as B.I.G, Shine and Mobb Deep--a raw street rhymer who mixes the thug and poet in one perplexing package. 50 cent earned extra cred by coming up through mix-tape popularity after his first album was dropped when the ex-boxer was shot on the eve of its release. Guns, threats, drug deals and misogyny populate 50 Cent's outlaw world, but it's a popular mix--hence his recently sealed link with Eminem's record company. The excellent "Wanksta" was pulled onto the 8 Mile soun...
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List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £3.39
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Artist:
Nas
Nasir Jones made this debut album at the age of 20, already armed with the calm perceptiveness and been-there-done-that attitude of a much older ghetto vet, though sometimes his inner callow youth shows itself. Illmatic is a look back at a life spent in the culture of the projects, acknowledging joy as much as pain and taking note of violence as a fact of his environment rather than a focus of his life. It's enlivened by Nas's kicky, deep-threaded multiple rhymes--you can tell he grew up listening to Mr. Magic's rap show and internalising the secrets of everybody's flow--and by tracks from a bunch of all-stars, including the Large Professor, DJ Premier, and, most m...
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List Price: £4.99
Our Price: £2.74
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Artist:
Kanye West
For haters eager to see Kanye hit a sophomore slump--no such luck. Late Registration can't replicate the novelty of last year's College Dropout, but otherwise, this is an impressively more mature and labored-over album. Lyrically, Kanye's only improved a notch but musically, the album sounds incredible, especially with co-producer Jon Brion helping polish the songs to perfection. Tracks like "Heard 'Em Say" (featuring Maroon 5's Adam Levine) and "Hey Mama," are richly textured in their soulfulness while the flint-edge of "Crack Music" and "Gone" (feat. Cam'ron) will appeal to the street-oriented. There's a few duds on here--the sickly-sweet, syrupy "Bring Me...
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List Price: £7.99
Our Price: £2.44
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