Lists of scary rap songs or particularly homicidal/suicidal rap tracks are the norm for Halloween but that’s never made a lot of sense to me because Halloween’s about having fun. Dressing like an asshole and getting candy and all that. Halloween memories for me are either the being a kid and walking around hoping to get a few more packages of Wonka Bottle Caps kind of fun or like, the being 16 or so and sneaking into this high school the night before Halloween–because that’s what you do the night before Halloween–and getting high on dust-off you found in the janitor’s closet kind of fun.
DJ Booman – “Monster Mash (Doo Dew Kidz Remix)”
Since posting a Booman track worked-out so well the last time. This is from 2006 or so if I remember correctly, and in typical Baltimore Club fashion, it takes a couple of disparate but connected samples like “Monster Mash” and Vincent Price’s awesome speech off “Thriller” and bounces between them and a classic club break. I especially like the piano line from “Monster Mash” and the way it comes around at the right time throughout and after Price’s speech, these great snippets Tangerine Dream-ish arpeggiation get a few moments to shine before the beat drops again.
Fat Boys – “Are You Ready For Freddy?”
The go-to on all the rap stations is Will Smith’s “Nightmare on My Street” but don’t sleep on this Freddy Krueger/Fat Boys collabo. Rappers need to be back on goofy shit like this. Instead, they collaborate with the queer from Coldplay or on a fashion line. One could easily see Kanye or Wayne doing a silly Halloween-themed song though.
-Whodini – “Haunted House of Rock”
-Jimmy Spicer – “Adventures of Super Rhyme”
-Xela – “Halloween Theme” off Halloween/Suspiria 7″
And if you want something more conventionally “scary” and Halloween-like, it should be atmospheric instead of suicidal, like this cover of John Carpenter’s classic theme for Halloween by XELA. Using a film projector sound almost like percussion, the usually-electronic XELA does a almost natural-sounding cover of the famous synth-horror theme. The other side of this is an equally awesome cover of the theme from Suspiria; XELA also have a zombies attacking a ship-themed album called Dead Sea that you should check out.
The Renaissance feels like a mix of all the rumors and half-completed projects that’ve bounced around Q-Tip’s career during the 2000s. It’s less electro, but similarly futuristic feeling in some way that makes sense when you hear it but can’t really be described. There’s also a clear flow and trajectory to the songs and their sequencing but because the songs also sound like odds and ends, it feels like a really well put-together mix CD from a friend, where the transitions are perfect but the tracks themselves don’t share a whole lot of commonality.
Dukes over at The Full Clip posted a pretty muddled and ultimately sorta safe but still worth discussing entry on XXL’s latest batch of “Freshman” and how it’s evidence of the negative influence of blogging on hip-hop. His biggest conflict is one that nearly anybody could agree with, at least at first: Very few of these guys have proven themselves and only a couple of them seem all that spectacular.
Examining and attributing influence to figures from rap’s pre-history that had an “influence” on actual rap history always feels like leap. You’re either idealizing the creation of the genre as totally outside of most other things and compartmentalizing all the differences between Tapper Zukie and Kool Herc or you kinda admit the influence even though it’s almost always a stretch. You can hear Gil Scott or Last Poets and be like, “I see how this is like rapping” but it’s just still not rapping and it’s weird.
-DJ Excel “Open the Doors (Alright)”
-DJ Khaled featuring Kanye West & T-Pain “Go Hard”
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