Rod Lee is generally considered the “club king of Baltimore” and for good reason, as he’s maybe the most prolific and charismatic of the Baltimore Clubbers. He’s also responsible for the first nationally distributed club release ‘Volume 5: The Official’ which you should buy like, immediately. It’s primarily music from Rod but also features tracks from Technics, KW Griff, Blaq Starr, and Lil Jay, so it’s a pretty good sampler. I find it to be one of the most consistently rewarding mixes and it features two summers ago’s local hit ‘Dance My Pain Away’. I’m not usually the kind of person that demands lyrical significance or relevance- especially in fucking club music- but ‘Dance My Pain Away’ manages to be as affecting as it is fun. If you think of dance music history, some of the best dance singles have something else going on, something political or personal or cultural or something and this song fits right into that. Whether it’s the “best” club song or not, it should probably be the like, representative Baltimore Club song especially for cynics or intellectual types who need some invocation of the struggle for music to be “important”. Again, Al Shipley on ‘Volume 5′.
Rod’s 2007 release ‘The Producer’ features a sort of sequel or something to ‘Dance My Pain Away’ called ‘Enjoy Yourself’ and it’s just about as good and follows the same concept of you know, having fucking fun despite the world pretty much sucking ass (it could be worse, it could be worse!).
Below is some older stuff from Rod that sounds even more lo-fi and homemade…there are about a million little details I could highlight about these tracks (the bouncy humming on ‘Nuttin But a Hoe’, the crazy looping of ‘Double Dutch Bus’ on ‘Gimmie Hoe’, the perfect amount of reverb on ‘Where Da Weed At?’…) but you should probably just listen.
Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader?