Listen: Eye Know / De La Soul
Eye Know / De La Soul

When I worked at Island in the late 80′s, the whole UK office were nuts about hip hop, most of them that is. When they’d visit New York for CMJ, or maybe it was called the New Music Seminar then, it would be straight to lower Broadway to buy sneaks and the East Village to see bands, all the while thinking they were steeped in hip hop culture. Pretty funny. Grass is always greener. I was just as guilty of acid house, or Brit pop as it cringingly got coined. De La Soul was top of the list for them all. They’d go on about De La this, De La that, like De La clothes and De La haircuts. It was a bit embarrassing. I suppose the lure of ghetto life was no different then than my attraction to it ten years earlier, whether it be Blaxploitation or funk. So fair enough.

Listen: Peg / Steely Dan
Peg / Steely Dan

I tell you what, my effort to avoid them failed, and De La Soul became a bit of a guilty pleasure. A double pleasure really, as it got me to lower my guard against Steely Dan. During their heyday, I was way more interested in The Buzzcocks or The Heartbreakers than all their polish. Taste changes with age, mine widens in fact. Because of ‘Eye Know’ I suddenly realized my affection for the sampled hook from ‘Peg’.

And I found I do love a nice UK pressed Steely Dan 7″, especially the promos.

Listen: Move The Crowd / Eric B. & Rakim 05 Move The Crowd.mp3

There’s just something about a hip hop track when it’s on 7″ vinyl. Luckily, the 45 configuration was still pretty prevalent during the 80′s but far from the format of choice for the genre. Therefore, very few were manufactured, and even fewer sold. Now, not unlike Jazz singles, they’re fairly collectable and are almost like novelty items. I, for one, stock piled them all: Sugarhill, Def Jam, Wild Pitch, Rock-A-Fella, Tommy Boy etc. So yeah, really appreciative to have the Eric B. & Rakim stuff on 7′s.

In the day, these guys were usually hanging around the Island offices on 4th & Broadway, when the company was located above Tower Records. It was a pretty fun location. All the latest releases one floor down, and Keith Richards living in a duplex at the top – a constant hub-bub of activity. Island seemed to be a place the artists liked to visit, and milling about, sometimes all day. It was not uncommon to have say, Melissa Etheridge and Etta James talking in the hallway, or like one memorable afternoon on my office couch, Chris Blackwell with Phranc, Marianne Faithfull and Julian Cope.

Eric B. and definitely Rakim were often playing records in Kathy Jacobson’s office. Rakim in particular was a mensch, polite, humble and really smart.

I have played ‘Move The Crowd’ hundreds and hundreds of times. It sounds great in the car, on the headphones, definitely on the jukebox, seriously everywhere.