HIPHOP 101



As it turns out, i received email from two colleagues who asked that i put their music up on here, one of them said they read my blog and noticed how i would start reviewing hiphop soon and wanted to get some recommendations pending on whether i really liked what they would pass by me. To be perfectly honest i was not ready to start yet as much as i may want to because i am very overloaded and hardly any new music impresses me much nowadays. After a brief discussion with a number of other colleagues who i bounce ideas like this off it became apparent that i need to put right withh sugaspott then i may feel at ease to proceed. I start to be very afraid because if they are right then sugaspott is essentially a demon i can never shake off. a fragment of my past destined to reside in my future. At first glance it sounds like a story with a happy ending but i bid you to stare much deeper and harder than that first glance.

I will cross examin every record i ever made and pick a topical BEST 5 and lets see if it is indeed possible. An interesting 3 hours later, (yes i have made that much music) i am faced with a conundrum of whitling down the records from a 10something to the 5 that currently wait below

In no particular order the five are :


TAKING CONTROL (Feat Emety)
This record is epic in that it epitomises everything my last album was meant to be. "The New Adventures Of sugaspott In Metropolis". It was my way of dealing with the evolution of the sound of hiphop and rap music. These new sounds i would have previously shunned and it was also an experience in broadening the networks i had collaborated with. The lyrics were as sugaspott usual very meaningful and personal in this case to my relationship with hiphop. Emety also outdid my expectations and as the producer i worked with also said, "Who is this Kid ?".




STOP, LOOK, LISTEN [D-VOCALIST REMIX]
The remix project was meant to be a prelude to the The New Adventures Album and so the idea was awesome, 10 remixes of my best track, one that almost landed the Warner record deal, If it wasnt for my hotheadedness lol, one that everyone didnt think i could better and all that. So the plot is simple, commision a bunch of producers to remix the track and obviously you will recieve differing concepts etc etc. What i didnt count on was D-Vocalist coming back around and keeping the idea very minimalistic in expansion, just a few tweaks and updating the sound from a very 90's sampling the 70's thing to a 20's reinventing the 70's thing. 5stars. I had a difficult time separating this from the PAPERPLATES REMIX on the same album, Damnit D-Vocalist just edged this one through. No bias i promise



REAL HIPHOP
The first song i ever put out as a single and this after about five albums (only 2 came out from that collection, my debut and sophomore lol and a remix album of a track whose album [minds of the hungry] never dropped). It was crafted. Produced by DJ Boycey, (real scratching, such is the art) Mixed and Mastered by Robin Hine of EMI Foundation (was a big deal for me at the time) with backing vocals from and lead vocals from korean artist Xu Li



RAP MEMOIRS
My debut album in a sense tells a story, i had to teitle it This Is My Story and every last lyric contained in it was a direct reference to something i had either been through was going through and at least to keep it all human there were no absurd predictions, well from my point of view. 12 tracks that embodied the spirit of hiphop and challenged ideas every so often and even then was a good album by any measure or standard. So if i was asked to describe Rap Memoirs the record i would call it The story behind This Is My Story. Produced by my own cousin, Spunky Genius aka iFlip its a crazy anthology sounding record and it goes deep and dark in parts and ends suddenly yet every moment is spent proclaiming and manifesting to a truth that is sugaspott. It was very hard to pick a track from this album because it was my first offering to the world under my first record label TM Records. Gosh it all seems like it was yesterday i was going through registrations and that being asked for bar codes and catalogue numbers etc etc The song itself also manages to tell the story in a very cryptic way, my favourite way and yet keep up enough to stay commercially viable lol, listen to me



D'ONT CRY
If picking the last track was hard then this was even worse. "Damage Limitation" my sophomore album was probably a 10 out of 10 and this is not a biased point of view, if you were to listen to that album then you would realise that there is very little separating that from say It was Written or Ready To Die which are both 5 mic albums. I chose D'ont Cry because on the album i needed something that took me back home and maybe with it i could paint a picture of life back home and dont cry did this. it was a ballad for my friends back home and everywhere else and it did the job, apart from being a very big favourite track of mine. I picked this up from MJD and additional Production by Sunny P. I heard you'se a genius!!!




BONUS TRACK

BLOOD FROM A STONE
The following track is not mine, i just happened to feature and unlike my other features where you know vocally from the begining of the track that i am involved in one way or the other this one was different in that i kind of crept in and out very silently and even when there was plans to remaster etc etc the idea of my unexpectedly hitting you with some 16 bars of stone cold reflective material remained apealling to me, it also contained one of the best verses from a boy meets girl and it just never worked out theme i ever wrote, very relevant as i know, i have been there before !!!