HOME CONTACT US Get our RSS feed: DISCLAIMER: Music hosted on this site is for preview purposes only. If you like what you hear please buy the artist's work. You can find much of it here: ARCHIVE January 2007

Derelicts of Dialect The best book ever written about hip-hop is ego trip's Book of Rap Lists. It ignores the academic hand-ringing of most rap tomes and instead revels in the clowning and geekery that is hip-hop’s real bedrock. Now the merry pranksters at ego trip have gone a step further and made the best ever hip-hop TV series: VH1’s ridiculously entertaining The (white) Rapper Show. At its most basic, it’s the Apprentice, but tricked out with hip-hop rims and smothered in irony. Here the hopefuls live in a rundown Bronx warehouse (the White House), travel around in a prison bus and are constantly, mercilessly mocked. T(w)RS’s Donald Trump is rap legend MC Serch of 3rd Bass fame and he comes prepared with his own neat little catchphrase: STEP OFF! (Incidentally, it seems Serch’s old partner in rhyme, Prime Minister Pete Nice, is now a baseball historian.) The contestants include a militant anti-racist who incoherently rails against white supremacy, a Paul Wall-alike grill-mouthed southern rapper, a Vanilla-Ice worshipping teenage girl and a bolshy New Yorker who sounds like MC Lyte and misguidedly drops the N-bomb ten minutes into the first episode. The show works as a hip-hop history lesson (Prince Paul, Brand Nubian, Kool Keith, Just Blaze, Bushwick Bill and Grandmaster Flash are just a few of the outstanding guests) and tackles head-on the inherent ridiculousness of suburban appropriation of hip-hop culture. It’s hysterically funny, but the show’s real success is that you end up rooting for the aspiring rappers. Take our personal favourite, self-proclaimed King of the Burbs, John Brown. In the first episode his dunderheaded blank stare and idiotic catchphrases (“Hallelujah hollaback!”, “Ghetto revival!”) provoke Persia (the aforementioned MC Lyte biter) into attacking him with a giant dildo. By episode 3 his bone-dry sense of humour and almost autistic single-mindedness, not to mention his surprisingly OK rapping, had us charmed. As Serch says (about four times an episode) THIS IS NOT A GAME PEOPLE! 3rd Bass - Steppin' to the A.M. [mp3] taken from The Cactus Album [buy] 3rd Bass - Ace in the Hole (ft. KMD) [mp3] taken from Derelicts of Dialect [buy] 3rd Bass - The Gas Face (Lyrical Remix) [mp3] taken from The Cactus Revisited Auditions: Team John Brown hits the Bronx: The Dildo Fight: Lord Jamar & Sadat X of Brand Nubian quiz John Brown on Ghetto Revival: Posted by: Scott 16/02/07