The Class of '94

Ever since I was a kid listening to the drum core at Howard University from our old row house on Gresham Place in DC I had always had a love for music. I grew up overhearing my fathers dub and reggae collection, my mothers soul and R&B music and my grandfathers voice as he practiced for his choirs yearly presentation of Handels Messiah. Around 9 or 10 I began to listen to the hip-hop mix shows that ran late night on the radio stations betweeen DC and Baltimore and began to immerse myself in the culture or rhymes, beats, b-boying and graff (in appreciation if not execution). I made tapes by the dozen, collecting mixes, editing out the commercials putting in other tracks together and so forth. I would collect old cassets that my brother or friends would throw away, put scotch tape over the square holes on the top, and copy over them with my own mixes. I guess I was kind of obsessive.

But one day just about every thing changed.

I was maybe 13 and my brother tossed me a tape to record over that came with a copy of URB magazine. I thought it was just some house mix (I had a rabid hatred of house at that time) but gave it a listen anyway. It opened up with some one talking about "Original Dancehall Jungle is there" and the "junglist massive". That person was General Levy on M-Beat's "Incredible" the first Jungle song I ever heard (peep a cut of the video). The beat was unlike anything I had ever heard, dense, bass heavy, mix of dancehall and something mildly futristic.

however it was the next track that made my jaw drop and my mind turn in on itself trying to process what I was hearing. It was Shy FX with UK Apachi's Original Nuttah. take a listen.


the fact that I can hear this song almost 14 years later and it still gives me a chill is a testament to how ground breaking the track is. It was as if everything that I loved about all of the different genera of music that I listened to was distilled in to a single moment of, well, ecstasy. There was the heavy bass lines that was reminiscent of the dub that I would hear echoing thru the house, the multi layered percussion that sounded like a drum core on speed, the rapid fire patois of UK Apachi bridging the lyrical gap between hip-hop, reggae, and street preacher. The speed of the track was the answer to what I felt was killing hip hop, slow tempo and predictable beats.

If that was not enough, on the other side was Goldies "Inner City Life" an unapologetically beautiful team up between the vision of Goldie and the engineering skill of Moving Shadow founder Rob Playford. I could write for hours on this song but I think I will let it speak for itself.





And thus my journey through the Jungle began.