Duke Bootee is made the mighty Linn Drum his bitch from 1985-87, providing b-boy’s with some of the loudest drums ever put to record after his stint as a session musician at Sugarhill. To the untrained ear, a lot of these records sound interchangeable, but they all hold-up surprisingly well thanks to the winning combination of monstrous snares, gravel-shattering scratches, Shout Rap and human beat-box. Oh, and never, ever, ever forget the novelty keyboard melody…
Word Of Mouth & DJ Cheese – – ‘King Kut’
The blueprint of Duke’s Beauty & The Beat sound, complete with concrete-shattering scratches from DMC champion DJ Cheese. The second pressing of the single had the Run-DMC sample removed due to clearance issues.
Z-3 MCs – ‘Triple Threat’
Word of Mouth Jnr., anybody?
Word Of Mouth & DJ Cheese – ‘Coast To Coast’
KMC and Ali-G rocked a little harder this time around thanks to tighter production and louder drums.
The Masterdon Committee – ‘Get Off My Tip’
Put away the good crystal, this is some ear-splitting shit right here. If Milk D and Ad-Rock had featured on a remake of this with Pebbly Poo it could’ve been called the ‘Screetch Rap’.
K-Rob – ‘I’m A Homeboy’
Rammelzee‘s one-time partner in rhyme delivered what I consider to be the finest moment in the Duke’s discography, with some assistance from the world famous Latin Rascals on the tape edit tip. Warning ladies: K-Rob is full of Olde English and may throw you into the pool.
Rap-O-Matic, LTD. – ‘Lies, Lies’
Kids, be sure to ask Santa for a Rap-O-Matic this Xmas. It’s the hottest toy on the streets right now!
Point Blank MCs – ‘What The Party Needs’
If New Jersey kid rap is what the party needs, then you’re in luck, my friend. Not a patch on their next record though.
Duke Bootee – ‘Broadway’
The Duke gets back to his social commentary roots with this catchy little ditty.
MC Crash – ‘Life On The Street’
The perfect compliment to the K-Rob record, MC Crash kicks some ‘cautionary tale’ science over some snares that’ll slap the shit outta you.
Point Blank MCs – ‘Hard To The Body’
This sounds a lot like the beat for ‘I’m A Homeboy’, so that automatically makes it a million times better than ‘What The Party Needs’. I interviewed the leader of this crew a while back too, hopefully I can find the tape. It was a helluva story.
Been looking for KKing Kut on MP3 for a while now! Good looking out.
You might want to rerip Hard to the Body — there’s a Windows alert sound in there around 1:45.
By the way — DMX > Linn Drum. Never really cared for the Linn Drum. To me the DMX is even more important in Hip-Hop than the 808 . . .
@haroon…Agreed the Oberheim DMX is the one, mary jane girl drums/slick ricks first record, that is the machine!
Those Word of Mouth cuts are classic. The K-Rob track is really dope, too.
Fun fact: that little drum stutter from “Triple Threat” was sampled in one of the first Japanese rap records.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv9qYGDQEtg
going way back.history class is in session.dope.
wow, that Japanese stuff was interesting to say the least, have you got anymore?
Now for the Duke Bootee interview…….
With any luck.
Sooooooooo Dope!
Keep up the good work Rob
Fetch my gold!
What a sound, what an era.