![]() Part of what made the Wu-Tang Clan so great was their messy, multitudinous sprawl. “When I felt like that, I was like, ‘This is it.’ Deep in my heart I felt like this was gonna be something big.” ![]() “When we listened back to the record, we just started crying,” Pete Rock recalled. Smooth spins a tribute to his fallen friend into a vivid celebration of family (literal, metaphorical and musical) that’s as much free-roaming backyard-barbecue toast as somber funeral speech. Over a tender, sky-blown sax sample from Sixties jazz-pop composer Tom Scott, C.L. Smooth came up with his lyrics before Pete Rock had produced the track, which is hard to imagine since they fit together so perfectly. The early-Nineties duo wrote the song for their Mount Vernon, New York, pal “Trouble” T-Roy, a dancer with Heavy D and the Boyz who died while on tour in 1990. Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You” is as beautiful as they come. Hip-hop has produced many classic elegies – from Ice Cube’s “Dead Homiez” to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads.” Pete Rock and C.L. They’d eventually reunite again in 2012, with Jam Master Jay’s two sons as part of the group. ![]() When Jam Master Jay (born Jason William Mizell) was shot and killed in 2002, Run-DMC immediately retired. ![]() But the group was adamant that “My Adidas/Peter Piper,” anthems of hip-hop culture, be the first release Darryl “DMC” McDaniels later recalled saying, “If ya’ll don’t do it, we’re gonna give it to the radio and fuck everything up.” They prevailed, and Raising Hell became rap’s first blockbuster album. Jam Master Jay sliced up composer Bob James’ 1975 smooth-jazz nugget “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” as Run and DMC dropped nursery-rhyme science in summing up their partner’s greatness: “He’s a big bad wolf in your neighborhood/Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good!” Run-DMC’s label, Profile Records, wanted the MTV-ready rap-rock Aerosmith collaboration “Walk This Way” to be the first single off their 1986 album, Raising Hell. The greatest ode ever to the Midas-like powers of a DJ. Chic, Blondie and Queen all make appearances in the mix, and Flash even threw in early rap hits by Spoonie Gee and his own crew, the Furious Five. On “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” 23-year-old Flash created a continuous party jam by splicing, scratching and, in a sense, reinventing records – “the short, climactic parts that really grabbed me,” he recalled. He was also an electronics geek who eventually came up with his own unique setup: using three turntables, a crossfader (a device he helped pioneer) and his own grab bag of frenetic moves. Flash’s days as a DJ date back to 1974, when he and other kids who were too young to get into discos began playing at house parties and block parties in their South Bronx neighborhoods. And the Grandmaster never cut faster than on the record that established the hip-hop DJ as a new kind of pop musician. “I was just one big human sampler,” Joseph “Grandmaster Flash” Saddler once said of his groundbreaking record-mixing technique.
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