Firstly, apologies for skipping last week’s post. Truth is, I have been playing catch up since term concluded, and at one of the Universities I teach at I was still teaching the day before Good Friday. Before I could take ten minutes for a brief mindfulness practice, I was painting eggshells, cutting out paper bunnies and chopping carrots. The respite from everyday hecticness was not available, but in its place a more fervent sense of hecticness propagated by small children conspiring with chocolate eggs.
I was intending to post about Funkadelic, but this article (yet again) has been pushed to the rear ring of the hob, the one with the manky burner caps that sit awkwardly on the burner head, the same ring which is only used at Christmas when more than four pans are required simultaneously, the same ring which needs lighting with a match because for some reason – probably due to years of accruing gunk – the ignition fails on every occasion. The Silent Boatman can glide peacefully across the open water; for another week at least.
With all the above in mind, I’m still operating in a sense of disarray. I long for next Monday when my kid starts back at school and I’m back at university, willing that feeling of anchorage which comes from even the most unorthodox routines. For me, routine fosters creativity.
So then, to the offering in this article. Again, I have dived into the virtual vault of songs from the 1980s (as I did for ‘To Jam Like This’ and ‘They Can’t Understand’ last year), and unearthed ‘My Posse’s On The Grow’.
In late 1986, three of us formed the second iteration of our crew, The Ill Brothers. We had a notion that in addition to making music all three of us were a part of, we would concurrently work on solo album projects. Mine album was titled To Jam Like This, and was finished in mid-1988, with five tracks each side of a TDK D 46 cassette. I was gratified with this self-production, yet at the same time, I acted far from protrusive about its completion. To Jam Like This sold a grand total of two units. It needs to be said, I’m a hopeless promoter and a worse salesperson.
Yet, this landmark in my opaque and sporadic recording career resonates with me still. The ten songs were constructed directly from close readings of rap albums of the time (although I still regret not completing the love rap I had penned), and contained a song about a new dance (‘The Ill Dance’), a reggae-infused song (‘Slow And Much Low’) which attempted to present a slow ragga style through a poorly-executed and – quite honestly – culturally obscene deejay style, a praise-the-DJ motif through ‘Get Down’, an open freestyle in ‘They Can’t Understand’, and several braggadocio songs in ‘I Love Bass’ (an ode to the beauty of bass), ‘Gimmie What You Got’ (riding on Le Pamplemousse’s beautiful song), and, the song included here, ‘Posse’s On The Grow’ from late 1987. Borrowing from album concepts by BDP, Jungle Brothers, MC Shan, LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane and Biz Markie, To Jam Like This was a prototype manufactured via a recalibrated montage of precedent studies. Although it alluded to a sense of product, it was, most certainly, process work.
So to the song. ‘Posse’s On The Grow’ is conceptually interesting, in that it is a posse cut with only one rapper. We’d given ourselves numbers as pseudonyms (I was Posse #3), and I boasted of Posse #1, who as ‘The Cut Terminator’, produces a bass so deep ‘… it will form a crater’, to Posse #2, whom I claim that ‘… ill beats he loves’, to me, Posse #3, who loves to abolish sucker emcees, squeeze rhymes devastatingly, control the mic, and enjoy the ‘cuts that are full of soul’.
Long dropped-in patterns from James Brown’s ‘Give It Up Or Turn It Loose’, Don’t Tell It’ (most definitely influenced by ‘D-Nice Rocks The House’ and ‘Poetry’), and ‘Hot Pants’ played a central role over our embryonic, overtly enthusiastic and less-experienced programming of the RX-5, and my questionable metaphors. The outro brings a curious pattern of percussion into the mix, further evidence of our experimentation through being, effectively, organically and self-taught through a love of hip hop.
I hope you enjoy this …
Thanks to my brother Rola for rescuing this song (and others) from the B+O reel-to-reel two-track recorder. Thanks also to Specifik, who has a certain tenacity when it comes to archiving shit.