Quotidie

And then he turned his power on and the ground began to move
And all the buildings for miles around were swaying to the groove
And just when he had fooled the crowd and swore he wouldn't fight
We rocked his beat with a 12 inch cut called Disco Kryptonite

-- Cozmo D of Newcleus -- "Jam on it"

I've had old-school hip-hop in my head lately. T La Rock's "It's yours", UTFO's "Roxanne, Roxanne" and "Bad Luck Barry", Kurtis Blow's "Basketball", and of course all sorts of stuff from Grandmaster Caz, The Trecherous Three, Afrika Bambaata and Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five. It's just been coming into my head unbidden. And when I think of the great classic "Jam on it", I get the most powerful memories of illegally jumping the fence at my boarding school with a few of my fellow hip-hop nerd friends and walking to Okigwe town to loiter about the local record shops. We'd ask the owner to play the Wiki Wiki Wiki song over and over. Serious psychedelic cosmic slop. I was too young (12 or 13) for it to have occurred to me that those dudes must have been on some heavy grass when they wrote that.

And by the way, I love the way that the French group Saïan Supa Crew (French hip hop is killing it right now, f'real) take on Newcleus's touch of a dude interjecting comic relief in a helium gassed up voice.

[Uche Ogbuji]

via Copia