A little late ’cause it’s a busy week, but I aim to make it up to you! This week is a little different, in that it’s light on bios and banter, but heavy on mixtape bangin’-ery.
So here’s the idea, I’ve collected some favorites from 1991-1994 that were played-the-hell-out-of on the radio in their day, but are very far off the beaten path today. This collection might be a little west-coast-centric, but don’t hate, that’s just the extent that my little boombox would tune to growing up in L.A.
Play it over and over in circles, ad nauseum, to replicate authentic radio programming circa 1992/3/4:
MP3: Das EFX - They Want Efx (1992)
MP3: Rodney-O & Joe Cooley - U Don’t Hear Me Tho’ (1993)
MP3: Ahmad - Back in the Day (1994)
MP3: Wreckx-N-Effect - Rump Shaker (1992)
MP3: Young Black Teenagers - Tap the Bottle (1993)
MP3: Volume 10 - Pistolgrip-Pump (1994)
MP3: Craig Mack - Flava in ya Ear (1994)
MP3: Domino - Getto Jam (1993)
MP3: N2Deep - Back to the Hotel (1992)
MP3: Positive K - I Got a Man (1992)
MP3: Icy Blu - I Wanna Be Your Girl (1991)
(Note that this isn’t from radio, these are all encoded digitally from CDDA, and are album versions in all their full F word glory.)
If you can’t feel this brand of “Urban Top 40″, then go crawl the fuck back into your backpacks. But that’s not you, you love this shit!
Do I listen to ‘Urban Radio’ much anymore?—Not really. Do you? Commercial radio is a wounded/dead format in the age of iPod + Missingtoof and the millions of other options. But, oh! Back in the day, radio was a constant, when even the bad was good (case in point; Icy Blu, who is essentially Vanilla Ice with tits and we love it).
Most all of these records are out of print, but not hard to come by through secondary markets like like eBay or Amazon affiliates.
If you’re fiending some hip hop history lesson, a good start would be this Wikipedia page and see where you end up.
