To my mind, there is no doubt that Kool Moe Dee was the best lyricist from the 1st generation of rappers, but you don't hear his prowess in the opening few songs. "Whip It," "Action," "Feel the Heartbeat," "The Body Rock," & even "Yes We Can Can" to some degree are in the original hiphop spirit of emcees being cheerleaders for the DJs, using the microphone to encourage people to dance. Of course, this works a lot better in a live setting than it does sitting down & listening to a record, but the energy in these tracks is infectious--you can almost feel the party cranking up around you as the 3 emcees trade lines back & forth. Like a lot of early rap groups, the focus is less on the emcees as individuals than on the unit doing its part to hype up DJ Easy Lee (who gets some cuts in despite Sugar Hill's Sylvia Robinson's usual insistence on having the record label's house band replay the samples instead of recording the DJ mix).
The group's biggest hit, "Yes We Can Can" is a party starter as well (an interpolation of the Pointer Sisters' funky 1973 single), but it's also a "message song." We get the usual lightweight "stay in school" type feelgood messaging, but it does get a little bolder, with Special K blaming "Reaganomics & atomics" for the problems of the proletariat. There's also a nice little moment where they decry drug dealers & hustlers before acknowledging a more nuanced reality: "We're not trying to put nobody down if you do/Because we know you got to live, this ain't directed to you."
As the compilation progresses, the songs on the whole get shorter--early hiphop was not about verse-chorus-verse, it was about keeping the party going, & 7-minute plus songs were the norm. (Only 1 song on this whole CD is under the 5-minute mark.) The MCs also start to differentiate themselves: "At the Party" from '83 (adapted from the Furious Five) is almost all rapped in unison, but by the time we get to "Gotta Rock" in '84, the emcees are taking their own verses to flex their own styles. This is where Moe Dee starts to emerge as the lyrical leader, with a voluminous vocabulary (in "Gotta Rock" he even addresses the biters for using "big words" in an attempt to sound like him) & complex metaphors. By '84 Moe Dee's solo career was on the horizon, so it's not surprising that the last 3 tracks feature him alone on the microphone--one of which is the scorching "Bad Mutha," which uses every trick in his lyrical arsenal & comes off even more scathing than his classic diss tracks on LL Cool J.
To me, the masterpiece on this album is "XMas Rap," the expanded version of "Santa's Rap" from Beat Street. It starts as an amusing conversation about Christmas when you're poor, & the resentment of kids who've been misled about the supposedly magical holiday--which is already a bolder & riskier premise for a social issue song than the inoffensive "Yes We Can Can." That's where the Beat Street version ends (after the "G.I. Joe look G.I. Gay" bit & Moe Dee's lispy swish impression, the less said about which the better). The version on this album continues though, getting even more pointed in its criticism of American inequality: "If the economy is getting better, getting better for who?" The song ends with a literal threat of communist revolution: "One day when you least expect it, we might even up the score." It's a great piece of writing & a testament to Moe Dee & company's artistic prowess that they could do so much with a novelty comedy Christmas song.
From lush full-band arrangements to clattering drum machines, from nursery rhymes to aggressive boasts, from having fun to fighting for justice, this compilation is a 12-track journey through the heady, tumultuous early '80s NYC hiphop scene, guided by some of of its premier pioneers.
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