It Took Seconds

Four minutes and six seconds: Hip-hop didn’t get playlisted a lot in Britain in the early 90s, and while it was covered in the music press it wasn’t often covered with much depth or knowledge - I think before Neil Kulkarni came along for Melody Maker there was basically nobody willing to even use the term “flow” or talk about what rappers actually did. One upshot is that collectives like Hieroglyphics or even Native Tongues, who might have got a positive reception among NME/Maker readers, got very little space. Obviously if I’d made more effort personally I could have found out plenty, but I was more interested in electronic stuff (assuming I was in any way typical, this is probably why hip-hop coverage in the UK was so woeful).

Once I got myself online, and once MP3s came along, things changed quickly and I could make some attempt at catching up.* Back in 2000 a Freaky Trigger contributor - Greg Scarth, who I’ve totally lost touch with - send me a CD-R of his hip-hop favourites and rarities, and on it was “Cab Fare” by Souls Of Mischief. I knew them from “93 Til Infinity” but I loved this even more - the way the familiar sample makes the track so welcoming, and the way it’s just four guys swapping stories about cabs from a range of perspectives (my favourite verse is the final one, from a driver’s point of view). Of course that sample is why I didn’t know the track already - it couldn’t get clearance and has circulated ever since on mixtapes and bootlegs. If by any chance you haven’t already heard it, you’re in for a treat.

*anyone who read my “Top 100 Singles Of The 90s” back in 1999 will have seen this process in embarassing action: the hip-hop selections, total perennials aside, are all stuff I’d only just discovered and the choices and ordering were close to random. Of course I didn’t let on to that in the write-ups: I still believed critics had to be authoritative.

What would your 4’06” track be?