Skip to main content
Eddie Rockerz VibeZ - curated playlists, mixes and music commentary

Dig the crates

Every playlist on the blog, sorted by where it takes you.

Browse all 600+ VibeZ

DJ Mixes & Series

The house sets, the Producer Series and the running volumes.

Show all 16Show fewer

Masta Ace VibeZ

Sixteen tracks from a Brooklyn rapper who has had four distinct careers and never once made a bad album.

Image result for masta ace"

Masta Ace

Masta Ace has one of the strangest and most admirable trajectories in hip-hop. He arrived in 1988 on "The Symphony", the Juice Crew posse cut that is still cited as one of the greatest rap records ever made, and he could have spent the following thirty years trading on that.

Instead he kept reinventing. He made a West Coast-influenced satire album when that was heresy for a New York rapper, then a pair of concept albums in the 2000s — carefully structured, character-driven, genuinely novelistic — that are among the best-written records the genre has produced.

Eminem has repeatedly and specifically named him as a formative influence, and the debt is audible: the internal rhyme schemes, the storytelling, the willingness to use humour as a delivery system for something darker.

What to listen for

"Acknowledge" is the best-known track here and the most quotable — a response record that is funnier and more precise than the situation required.

"Beautiful" is the one to play for anyone who thinks the concept albums are a chore; it is warm, straightforward and completely disarming.

"Young Black Intelligent" with Chuck D and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble is the most ambitious arrangement on the list, and having Chuck D on it is not decoration.

"The Fight Song" with Pharoahe Monch, from the Marco Polo collaboration, is the technical showcase — two of the most precise writers in the music going at it over a hard beat.

"Soda & Soap" with Jean Grae is the best duet, and "Think I Am" with MF DOOM is the one the crate-diggers will want.

"Story of Me" and "Bklyn Masala" are where the autobiographical writing is strongest.

Go deeper

Disposable Arts (2001) and A Long Hot Summer (2004) are the two concept albums and the essential records. SlaughtaHouse (1993) is the satire nobody understood at the time.

The Juice Crew catalogue — Big Daddy Kane, Kool G Rap, Biz Markie, and Marley Marl's production — is the foundation, and Marco Polo is the producer to follow forward.

Listening note: the internal rhyme is the thing to follow. He rhymes inside lines rather than only at the ends of them, and stacks two or three schemes in the same bar without raising his voice about it. That technique is what a generation of more famous rappers took from him, and it is audible here in its original, unhurried form.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more

De La Soul VibeZ (R.I.P Trugoy the Dove)

Trugoy the Dove died in February 2023, weeks before De La Soul's catalogue finally reached streaming after a fifteen-year legal deadlock. Thirty-one tracks, and a difficult kind of timing. Rest in peace, Dave David Jude Jolicoeur — Trugoy the Dove, later just Dave — formed De La Soul in Amityville, Long Island with Posdnuos and Maseo. Their 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising , produced with Prince Paul , remains one of the most inventive records in the history of the genre: dense with samples from Steely Dan to Johnny Cash to French language instruction tapes, funny, formally strange, and entirely uninterested in the postures rap was expected to strike. The consequence of that invention was a curse. The sample clearance landscape changed after Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie in 1991, and De La Soul's early catalogue — built on hundreds of uncleared fragments — became legally impossible to license. For roughly fifteen years, their most important a...
Post a Comment
Read more