Critical Beatdown

Critical Beatdown
Critical Beatdown
Studio album by Ultramagnetic MCs
Recorded 1986-88
Genre Hip hop
Length 50:01
Label Next Plateau
Producer Ced-Gee, Paul C, Ultramagnetic MCs
Ultramagnetic MCs chronology
Critical Beatdown
(1988)		 Funk Your Head Up
(1992)
Singles from Critical Beatdown
  1. "Ego Trippin'"
    Released: 1986
  2. "Travelling at the Speed of Thought"
    Released: 1987
  3. "Funky"
    Released: 1987
  4. "Watch Me Now"
    Released: 1988
  5. "Ease Back"
    Released: 1988
  6. "Give the Drummer Some"
    Released: 1989

Critical Beatdown is the debut studio album by American hip hop group Ultramagnetic MCs, released October 4, 1988, on Next Plateau Records.[1] Production for the album was handled primarily by the group's rapper and producer Ced-Gee, who employed a E-mu SP-1200 sampler as the album's main instrument. Music writers have noted the album for its innovative production, funk-based samples, self-assertive themes, ingenious lyricism, and complex rhyme patterns.

Although it charted modestly upon its release, Critical Beatdown has since been acclaimed by music critics as a classic album of hip hop's "golden age" and new school aesthetic. The album's abstract rhymes in strange syncopations laid on top of sampling experiments proved widely influential, from Public Enemy to gangsta rap to several generations of underground hip hop artists.[2][3][4][5] Critical Beatdown was reissued by Roadrunner Records in 2004, with additional tracks.

Contents

Background

Before forming as a hip hop group, Ultramagnetic MCs members Cedric "Ced-Gee" Miller, "Kool" Keith Thornton, DJ Moe Love (Maurice Smith), and TR Love (Trevor Randolph) from The Bronx, New York were break dancers for the New York City Breakers and People's Choice crews.[6] They recorded a demo, "Space Groove", in 1984 and released their first single "To Give You Love" in 1986.[6] Other singles, including "Space Groove" and "Something Else", became popular at block parties and earned the group notice in the underground music scene, eventually leading to the group's signing with dance-oriented record label Next Plateau Records.[7]

The group made a stylistic breakthrough with their subsequent 1986 single "Ego Trippin'". The song boasted dense, minimalist production, featuring synthesizer riffs and a drum sample from Melvin Bliss' "Synthetic Substitution", and erratic lyricism by Ced-Gee and Kool Keith.[6] The group's 1987 single "Funky" showcased Ced-Gee expanding on his production style, incorporating a piano sample from "Woman to Woman" by Joe Cocker.[6] Before the release of Critical Beatdown, he contributed to production on albums such as Paid in Full (1987) by Eric B. & Rakim and Criminal Minded (1987) by Boogie Down Productions.[6]

Music

The dynamic, choppy production on Critical Beatdown was handled primarily by Ced-Gee, who used a E-mu SP-1200 sampler.[3] His sampling of early recordings by James Brown, particularly their guitar and vocal parts, added to the music's abrasive, funk-oriented sound and exemplified the growing popularity of such sampling sources in hip hop at the time.[3] In the second edition of The Rough Guide to Hip Hop (2005), music journalist Peter Shapiro notes its music's energy as reminiscent of The Cold Crush Brothers and writes of the album's musical significance, "It may have been a stunning explosion of early sampling technology, but Critical Beatdown remains a devstating album even in an age of 32-bit samplers and RAM-intensive sound-editing software."[8] He also views that the technological limitations of using such a sampler added to the album's style, making the music "rawer, more immediate, and more febrile, like a raw nerve."[3] Hip hop production team The Bomb Squad has cited the album as a major influence on their production for Public Enemy's 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.[8] Shapiro dubs it one of the greatest hip hop albums and comments on its musical legacy, "Recorded at a time before 'street' and 'experimental' were mutually exclusive terms, it ushered in hip-hop's sampladelic golden age and laid the foundation for several generations of underground rap."[2]

Kool Keith's and Ced-Gee's lyrics on the album are characterized by abstract braggadocio,[9] stream-of-consciousness narrative style,[10] and psuedoscientific terminology.[11] The Anthology of Rap, published by Yale University Press, makes note of such terminology in Ced-Gee's lyricism on the album's 1986 single "Ego Trippin'", particularly the lines "Usin' frequencies and data, I am approximate / Leaving revolutions turning, emerging chemistry / With the precise implications, achieved adversively".[11] Kool Keith's rhymes are manic and expressed in a staccato pace.[11] His lyrics on "Ego Trappin'" also criticize the musical aesthetic of old school hip hop artists at the time: "They use the simple back and forth, the same old rhythm / That a baby can pick up and join right with them / But their rhymes are pathetic, they think they copasetic / Using nursery terms, at least not poetic".[11]

Reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source Rating
Allmusic 5/5 stars[12]
Blender 4/5 stars[13]
Melody Maker (favorable)[14]
NME (9/10)[15]
Pitchfork Media (9.7/10)[16]
Rolling Stone 4.5/5 stars[17]
The Source 5/5 stars[18]
Spin (9/10)[19]
Sputnikmusic 4.5/5 stars[20]
Trouser Press (favorable)[21]

Allmusic editor Stanton Swihart praised the album's production as "forward-looking" and called it "an undeniable hip-hop classic [...] one of the finest rap albums from the mid- to late-'80s 'new school' in hip-hop."[12] He noted the "lyrical invention" of Kool Keith's and Ced-Gee's respective styles, adding that "Somewhere in the nexus between the two stylistic extremes, brilliant music emanated. Critical Beatdown maintains all its sharpness and every ounce of its power, and it has not aged one second since 1988."[12] Trouser Press journalist Jeff Chang called it "an amazing debut" and complimented Kool Keith's "shifty rhyme patterns", while writing that Ced-Gee "pushes sampling technology to its early limits, providing sonics that are less bassy and more breakbeat heavy than most of their contemporaries."[21] Pitchfork Media's Alex Linhardt called it "a flawless album—one that stands tall today as one of Golden Age's most ageless," lauding Kool Keith's "lyrical ingenuity" and citing Ced-Gee as "the source of the album's most insane, digitalk-quantum gibberish, spouting lines [...] [T]hey should be studied in seminars alongside general relativity."[16] Linhardt attributed its music's "surging psychosis" to DJ Moe Love's turntablism and Ced-Gee's dense funk sampling, particularly his arrangement of vocal samples, writing that they "are ingrained in the very fabric of the beat, concealed and crippled amidst the relentlessly fuzzing bass. And like most great rap albums, many of them come from the patron saint of yelps, James Brown, and flurry and flux with such abstraction and chaos that they make the beats feel deceptively fast-paced."[16]

Melody Maker stated in a retrospective review, "full of scratch-tastic heavy beat, gold plated hip hop which manages to combine the minimalist ground-breaking Sugar Hill sounds with the show-no-mercy aural assault of the then-emerging Public Enemy."[14] NME gave it a nine out of 10 rating and called it "a bona fide classic."[15] Sputnikmusic's Louis Arp noted the group's sound as "developed solely around the sampler" and stated, "Critical Beatdown's notoriety as one of hip-hop's first copyright offenders is more than slightly impressive. The album unashamedly nicks from the common James Brown staples and then-popular drum breaks like Melvin Bliss' 'Synthetic Substitution' [...] Those grooves, the lyrics and the all around unique feel of the album make for some innovating hip-hop."[20] Arp commented that the album "marks a sign of hip-hop's early burgeoning creative maturity" and praised Ced-Gee's "method of chopping up samples, rather than simply looping them like most of his contemporaries did, essentially changed the way the producer approached the hip-hop beat," adding that "One could go so far to call these tracks as genre defining."[20] Rolling Stone writer Peter Relic gave the album four out of five stars in a June 2004 review, citing it as the group's "quintessential release."[22] Writing in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), journalist Kembrew McLeod gave Critical Beatdown four-and-a-half out of five stars and called it "a bona fide classic of hip-hop's 'golden age' of the late '80s and early '90s, an album that was mostly ignored at the time but whose reputation has grown exponentially in the years since."[17]

Track listing

All songs were written by Cedric Miller, Keith Thornton, Maurice Smith (DJ Moe Love), and Trevor Randolph.[23]

# Title Producer(s) Sample(s)[25] Length
1. "Watch Me Now" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs
  • "Gimme Some More" by The JB's
  • "It's Just Begun" by Jimmy Castor Bunch.
 0:40
2. "Ease Back" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs
  • "The Grunt" by The J.B.'s
  • "Ease Back" and "Little Old Money Maker" by The Meters
  • Line from speech by former US President Ronald Reagan, "Thirty seconds to respond..."
 3:24
3. "Ego Trippin' (Original 12" Version)" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs
  • "Synthetic Substitution" by Melvin Bliss
 5:26
4. "Moe Luv's Theme" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs
  • "Pussyfooter" by Jackie Robinson
  • "Give it to You" by UPP
 2:14
5. "Kool Keith Housing Things" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs 3:15
6. "Travelling at the Speed of Thought (Remix)" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs 1:51
7. "Feelin' It" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs 3:31
8. "One Minute Less" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs —— 1:58
9. "Ain't It Good to You" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs —— 3:33
10. "Funky (Remix)" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs —— 3:40
11. "Give the Drummer Some" Paul C 3:43
12. "Break North" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs 3:24
13. "Critical Beatdown" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs 3:42
14. "When I Burn" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs
  • "Cookies" by Brother Soul
  • "Rock Creek Park" by the Blackbyrds
  • "Funky" by Ultramagnetic MCs
 2:32
15. "Ced-Gee (Delta Force One)" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs 2:49

2004 edition bonus tracks

# Title Producer(s) Sample(s) Length
16. "Funky (Original 12" Version)" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs 4:47
17. "Bait (Original 12" Version)" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs 4:26
18. "A Chorus Line (Original 12" Version)" (featuring Tim Dog) Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs 6:04
19. "Traveling at the Speed of Thought (Hip House Club Mix)" Paul C 4:22
20. "Ego Trippin' (Bonus Beats)" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs —— 1:11
21. "Mentally Mad (Original 12" Version)" Ced-Gee, Ultramagnetic MCs 5:05

Personnel

Credits for Critical Beatdown adapted from Allmusic.[26]

  • Carlton Batts – mastering
  • Janette Beckman – photography
  • Ced-Gee – engineer, producer, vocals
  • Kool Keith – vocals
  • André Harrell – executive producer
  • Kimberly Brathwaite Moore – production coordination
  • Paul C – producer

Charts

Chart (1989)[27] Peak
position
US Billboard Top Black Albums 57

Sample use

List of songs sampling material from Critical Beatdown adapted from WhoSampled.[28]

Notes

  1. ^ Hip-Hop's Greatest Year: Fifteen Albums that Made Rap Explode. Rolling Stone. February 12, 2008. Retrieved on 2008-07-27.
  2. ^ a b Shapiro, Peter (2005), p. 376.
  3. ^ a b c d Classic Material (2003), p. 161.
  4. ^ "Hip Hop's Greatest Albums By Year" in Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Chairman Mao, Gabriel Alvarez & Brent Rollins. ego trip's Book of Rap Lists, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, pp. 331–337. ISBN 978-0-312-24298-5
  5. ^ Brian Coleman, Check the Technique, New York: Villard, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8129-7775-2
  6. ^ a b c d e Shapiro, Peter (2005), p. 374.
  7. ^ Cooper, Sean (November 1, 2001). Ultramagnetic MC's: Biography. Allmusic. Retrieved on 2011-07-15.
  8. ^ a b Shapiro, Peter (2005), p. 375.
  9. ^ a b Freeman, Phil (2007), p. 205.
  10. ^ a b Cobb, William Jelani (2007), p. 54.
  11. ^ a b c d The Anthology of Rap (2010), p. 497.
  12. ^ a b c Swihart, Stanton (November 1, 2001). Critical Beatdown - Ultramagnetic MC's: Review. Allmusic. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
  13. ^ Columnist (2004). Critical Beatdown - Blender. Blender. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
  14. ^ a b Columnist (October 18, 1997). "Review: Ultramagnetic MCs, Critical Beatdown". Melody Maker (IPC Media): 53. 
  15. ^ a b Columnist (October 4, 1997). "Review: Ultramagnetic MCs, Critical Beatdown". NME (IPC Media): 55. 
  16. ^ a b c d Linhardt, Alex (June 10, 2004). Album Reviews: Ultramagnetic MC's: Critical Beatdown. Pitchfork Media. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
  17. ^ a b Rolling Stone (2004), p. 836.
  18. ^ Kazeem (August 4, 2010). The Complete List Of 5 Mic Hip-Hop Classics. The Source. Retrieved on 2010-12-23.
  19. ^ Weisbard, Eric (1995). p. 418.
  20. ^ a b c Arp, Louis (June 29, 2006). Ultramagnetic MCs - Critical Beatdown (album review). Sputnikmusic. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
  21. ^ a b Jeff Chang (1997). TrouserPress.com :: Ultramagnetic MC's. Trouser Press. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
  22. ^ Relic, Pete (June 24, 2004). Ultramagnetic MC's: Critical Beatdown [Bonus Tracks] : Music Reviews. Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on 2010-10-04. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
  23. ^ (2004) Album notes for Critical Beatdown by Ultramagnetic MCs [CD booklet]. United States: Roadrunner Records.
  24. ^ Ultramagnetic MCs. "When I Burn". Next Plateau, 1988.
  25. ^ The (Rap) Sample FAQ. The-Breaks.com. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
  26. ^ Critical Beatdown - Ultramagnetic MC's: Credits. Allmusic. Retrieved on 2011-07-15.
  27. ^ Critical Beatdown - Ultramagnetic MC's. Billboard. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
  28. ^ Ultramagnetic MC's Music Sampled by Others. WhoSampled. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.

References

  • Bradley, Adam; DuBois, Andrew (2010). The Anthology of Rap. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300141900. * Oliver Wang (ed.) Classic Material, Toronto: ECW, 2003. ISBN 978-1-55022-561-7
  • Phil Freeman, Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs, Da Capo Press, 2007. ISBN 0306814854
  • Nathan Brackett, Christian Hoard (2004). The New Rolling Stone Album Guide. Completely Revised and Updated 4th Edition. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-0169-8. 
  • Peter Shapiro, Rough Guide to Hip Hop, 2nd. ed., London: Rough Guides, 2005. ISBN 978-1-84353-263-7
  • Weisbard, Eric; Craig Marks (1995). Spin Alternative Record Guide. Vintage Books. ISBN 0-679-75574-8. 
  • William Jelani Cobb (2007). To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. NYU Press. ISBN 0-81471-670-9. 

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