Rare Vinyl/Break: Eugene McDaniels' "Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse"

The best thing about music of any form or genre is that it can have whatever life you want it to have. It doesn't matter how mainstream or obscure that particular piece of music is/was. What a lot of people tend to gloss over, is that, Golden Age Hip Hop, (roughly 87-96) is part and parcel proof that music can take on a life of it's own and be reborn at any minute.

My biggest beef with the Hip Hop that the kids are listening to nowadays is that it's overproduced, too loud, and lacks samples. this isn't suffice to say that all overproduced/nonsampled hip hop is bad, there are certainly exceptions to the rule. What I am saying is that samples/breaks used in hip hop songs gave the genre depth and made it inspiring.I know I may sound like the crotchety, single 65 year old man that lived down the street from you growing up, I promise there's a genesis to coincide with this sentiment.

If you look back a few posts to ?uestlove's record collection youtube, you'll notice he pulls this record off the shelf and breaks down how this was rare and has since been repressed. I made a mental note of some of the stuff he pulled out; This record seemed that it was, in many ways, the crown jewel of his collection. He had an original press of this record, which he said he paid about $300 for while on tour w/ The Roots in Japan. When I saw a repress on the shelf at local vinyl compound End of an Ear, I couldn't pass it up.

As ?uesto states this LP has some undeniable source material. of the 8 songs, I believe 7 have been sampled in hip hop songs. Pete Rock sampled the hell out of this record on their seminal LP. Mecca and the Soul Brother, Ali Shaheed from a Tribe Called Quest fed off this record for various tribe cuts, and The Beasties took "Susan Jane" and made it into "Get It Together" which can most certainly be found on Ill Communication.

Luminary producers used to have a tight-knit digging community, looking for breaks to round out their tracks and make them special. From what I understand, there's still some producers that do this, it's just not as widely practiced, as, suffice to say, the artform has taken a pretty dramatic paradigm shift within the last 10 or so years. While this may not be a bad thing per se, It's great to revisit the days when a $2 find at a brooklyn record shop could burn up the charts for another moment in history.

So there's the rest of the story.

Now get off my lawn.

-Marv.