Ah…so only a few Xboxes would suffer from Red Ring of Death. What a piece of shit. Was watching The Wire last weekend via my PC that I have steaming to this plastic piece of crap. That’s a whole new story by the way, streaming from a (windows Microsoft) PC to a (Microsoft) XBox. So complicated. So hit and miss. So…illogical. Anyway, after five years of trying to get a stream to work I hear BEEP and the whole xbox locks up JUST LIKE THAT. Frozen. I turn it off and turn it on and there, blinking at me, is the flashing Red Ring of fuckery. In essence it means it’s broken. Its also out of warranty. Rumour has it that 1 in 3 die like this. So I am left with a pile of Microsoft shit that is out of warranty. What to do in Bahrain? There are no authorised dealers on this rock so you have to go to some dodgy shop in the hope they know what they are doing but they don’t. I don’t trust them. I tried the towel trick and it worked. For a week. SO I can pay more loot and hope they know what they are doing OR I can stop throwing good money after bad and finally get a PS3. Blu Ray. HDMI. No Region shit. Just games. And Blu Ray. This is the point I actively start avoiding Microsoft now. No more PC’s for me and no more XBox. I don’t care how fly they are I’m not giving them any of my hard earned anymore.
Released in 1996 when I was a poor student. Broke as a motherfucker but still with a record player I was living in Manchester and would often trawl through Piccadilly Records in Manchester looking, with flat pockets, in the windows and the racks at records I couldn’t afford. Around this time I saw this from Sadat X who was dropping his first solo work outside of Brand Nubian. Out of all the Brand Nubian members Derek X aka Sadat X was always my least favourite. He was the one that had the annoying voice and I preferred Jamar and Puba but there was always something about his flow that intrigued. Over time I have begun to appreciate his idiosyncrasies and unique style and so I downloaded some of solo albums a while back. Wild Cowboys (for some fucking reason Cowboys were in vogue in mid 90′s hip hop for a short while) is a fucking great album. Bit of a flop on release but surely must be a nomination for cult classic these days. Wild Cowboys is an album in the strictest sense – no real stand out tracks as such and the singles that were released from it – Hang ‘Em High which is some weird Diamond produced Cowboy thing and Showbiz’s Stages and Lights and the party jam Lump Lump – are all fully passable but not hit record material. No, The album tracks are where its at homeslice. Sauce For Birdheads is a jazzy, plinky plonky hip hop masterclass not least of all because it features Shawn Black. Shawn Black who litters this album but is now M.I.A. Seemingly disappeared after this release which is a real shame because he brings a lot to the rap table. Open Bar is a stunning sloooow jam featuring Puba and is indeed smother than a fez on the head of Kojak. This is all good but there are two real stand out moments. Stand out moment number 1: Petty People. This could have come straight from Stunts, Blunts and Hip Hop – Diamond D on the board and Sadat and Shawn Black rip this to shreds. Its so good. THIS should have been a single but they overlooked it for Lump Lump? Crazy ish. Second Stand Out Moment: Escape From New York. Pete Rock delivers a beautiful, soul laden groove whilst Sadat laments how hard life in the Big Apple is (his girl just caught a case). These two make the album an essential purchase alone but then you have the stoned Hashout (this whole album is high as a kite come to think about it) which is very trippy but menacing with it and Shawn Black, again, provides the lyrics ‘pop the block, we bubble like Shampoo’. Been trying to get an US OG copy for a while but saw some chump posting a mint copy on Ebay today for 8 pounds instead of the usual 20+ quid on Discogs. Buy It Now. Done. You have been.
There was a time when, just after Cypress Hill dropped their first album, that DJ Muggs had hip hop on lock. His sound was unique, raw and brash and funky as a pair of James Browns socks and he was highly sought after as a producer. His stock only increased when he produced Jump Around for a average MC called Everlast already dropped from Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate label and turned him into a superstar if only for a month or so. I doubt even Muggs would have believed how big that record would be but there it was and so the logic goes that anything he touches would follow a similar path. We see it so many times in Hip Hop where, when any group blows up, all the weed carriers around them get signed which is where Funkdoobiest enter the scene. Latino stoners with cartoon covered record sleeves and friends in high places. Their first album was proceeded by the the Muggs produced ‘Bow Wow Wow’ which is a slowed down Jump Around with extra bass which, AT THE TIME was banging but alas has not aged well. Thankfully that was one that slipped through my fingers however their debut album on clear vinyl was purchased on its release and I was not disappointed. Its a great album and the real stand outs are the T-Ray tracks. Lovely, subtle things and hidden away at the end of side one and simple, effective Hip Hop. ‘Whose the Doobiest’ and Where’s It At’ stand out for me but there are others. The problem with light-hearted, cartoony, stoner rap is that its doesn’t stay with you like a Word…Life or Illmatic does so after my initial buzz I kind of got bored and looked elsewhere for a high hence me overlooking their second LP and the rest of their careers. This is why I missed Rock On from their second LP Brothas Doobie. The 12″ has the title track (which, by itself is a lovely DJ Muggs produced slow burner) but its really the remix by the brilliant Buckwild that does the trick for me. Picked up for $2.50 not including P&P on US OG WAX. You can’t front on Discogs science.
Oman then. Its OK.Not blown away but not that bad. Kind of sleepy and the national dress is nice and the airport is OK. Back home and then on to Doha the next day. Doha,Qatar is not great. A dry arid and much hotter desert than Bahrain. Somehow lacks a soul. The cornice is not great either. Glad to fly back to Bahrain. Work the next day was filled with not much apart from in-fighting staff and a dream to get back to the desert.
