Senegal-born MC Solaar, the million-selling French-language rapper, continues to channel hip-hop through his own vibrant cultural experience with Mach 6. Steeped in silky acoustic jazz texture, native African instrumentation, and elegant orchestral strings supplied by the Moscow Orchestra, the album offers a take on hip-hop that, next to the casual violence common to the US urban landscape, ...
The debut LP from the formidable scratching DJ, Kid Koala fulfils the fevered critical and public response that greeted his "live" sets and remixes/collaborations with Money Mark, DJ Vadim and Handsome Boy Modelling School. Koala describes his LP as having been "hand-cut": this is music that was made by manipulating his vinyl and record decks--much of it in real-time. A radical approach but Koala ...
It seems like such a natural progression for French hip-hop to take off--after all, there's only so many MCs out there with anything original to say or a novel way of saying it, so the flow of the rapper's patter is easily as important as what they're rapping about. French, with its cultivated smoothness, sounds beautiful and naturally flows from thought to thought; chanted over beats, the effect ...
Although the Dream Warriors' debut was released in 1991--the same year as De La Soul Is Dead and Definition of Sound's Love & Life--the album never received proper recognition. Mixing together jazz (the first song is "My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style," which out-loops anything Us3 ever did) and pop, crossing De La's "D.A.I.S.Y. Age" sensibilities with P.M. Dawn's summery ...