SOUL DIMENSION – “Trash-An-Ready” (aka PopNose2): I have been able to find out almost nothing about this track! Search parties came back empty-handed save for an offhand reference by the all-knowing Woebot to early hip-hop/dancehall hybrids. What else do I know? It’s from 1987 – I think – and it’s on B-Boy Records, which also put out the early BDP and KRS-One singles. This last is the one fact I’m sure of because the CD it’s from is called The Best Of B-Boy Records, a 2CD set on Landspeed, also it turns out recommended by Woebot and I have to give a hearty nod to that – it’s excellent, vibrant mid-80s hip-hop which puts its most famous tracks (“Strong Island”; “South Bronx”) at the end and you don’t even find yourself looking forward to them. “Trash-An-Ready” is completely atypical of the comp, which is mostly enormous dry drums and splashes of electro. The other amazing thing about the set is that you can buy it for THREE POUNDS in the Fopp Records beg pile: if you live near a Fopp go there NOW and clean them out of it. You can still get it on Amazon too but it’ll cost four times as much.
Anyway, this track. Mike Daddino and I had a chat about it – he thought it was a British MC, I wasn’t sure. I think now it might be, though I’m not sure what such a beast would be doing on an East Coast hip-hop label; maybe Brit-rap hadn’t got its bad rep at this point. Whatever the case the MCing isn’t the most fluent, and the stitching together of the rap bits and the ragga bits is very basic: in fact the ragga bits themselves are pretty obvious, riding a bassline so well known (“Sleng Teng”) that even I recognised it. But it works! It has a rough eagerness about it that I find very charming, and in context it’s both primitive and prescient.