B-Boy
Crown City Rockers
Earthtones, 2004

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This is the best ode to growing up with hip hop outside of New York that I’ve ever heard. It’s strangely honest (”acting like you hard when you ain’t (nah!)”) and it’s definitely from a fan perspective which seems rare because most MCs are too busy trying to prove how long they’ve been down and under-appreciated.

I decided to post this song this week because somewhere around 4:50 a.m. on sunday morning as I hanging out in WBAI’s studios learning my music history lesson courtesy of the Rare Radio crew (DJs Emskee, Monk One, 3D, Tomcat and Randy Anderson), DJ Tomcat played the song that was sampled for “B-Boy” as the closing song for the show.

“Idolizing Scrap and Scoob” is my favorite line of the song because I have a such a clear memory of looking at the inside of my brother’s Big Daddy Kane cassette booklet and seeing this:

And the picture of Hot 97’s Mister Cee (aka the “Nasty African” or “N.A.” for short - what??) 20 years ago is also priceless.

This is the video; I’d heard the song so many times before I saw it that I didn’t like it at first but it’s grown on me some. I guess the song is so perfect for inserting my own memories (not that I ever tagged freeways) that the video is disappointing because it doesn’t actually take place in my head (or include me open-air dubbing songs off of our TV speaker while re-watching Beat Street on a movie format (not Beta) I can’t even remember the name for).

>> songs are available for two weeks [5.6 MB]

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Music Appreciation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.