I’ve just completed my Christmas shopping and I’m feeling relieved and ready to settle down and enjoy the holidays. First, let’s bring on some early nineties rap.
Disc 1524 is…. The Very Best of Brand Nubian
Artist: Brand Nubian
Year of Release: 2001 but featuring music from 1990-1998
What’s up with the Cover? The band poses under a…pergola? I’ve never fully understood the pergola. I mean, I get that it keeps the sun off, but wouldn’t it be better with a roof?
How I Came To Know It: My former coworker Adrienne and her partner introduced me to Brand Nubian (and a bunch of other nineties rap acts besides). We used to trade musical recommendations at work. We still trade them every now and then. Just because we don’t work together doesn’t mean we don’t both still enjoy music!
How It Stacks Up: This is a compilation album, so by the rules of the CD Odyssey it doesn’t get stacked or rated. I do have one other Brand Nubian album but I accidentally got the “clean” version (no swears). I’ll be looking to replace that ASAP with the real record. It is a travesty that the “clean” version was ever a thing.
Ratings: “Best of” albums don’t get rated. They are not true albums.
Brand Nubian is another great artist from the golden age of rap music, which for me runs from around the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties. Most of the songs on this compilation land within that range and are some of the finest examples of the sound.
The first thing you notice about Brand Nubian is how funky they are. This era has a lot of talented emcees, but Brand Nubian has a notable talent for great samples that make these songs not just great raps, but great dance tunes as well. The breadth of sampled artists (they cross through funk, R&B, mainstream pop and many others) is considerable, and you can tell that these guys are true lovers of music. Those little clips don’t magically reveal themselves to you, they’re found through countless hours of listening to other kinds of music.
For many of these songs Brand Nubian features three emcees (Grand Puba, Sadat X and Lord Jamar) each with their own style and sound. They trade off within each song but remain aligned to the same beat, and never feel disconnected. In this way, they reminded me favourably of the Beastie Boys, although their style is overall a lot more smooth groove than the more aggressive spitting of the Beasties.
Some compilations albums make the mistake of trying to weight a band’s career evenly, which can result in lesser tunes getting included just to provide balance. As a listener, I just want to the best songs, and don’t care if they are new, old, or somewhere in between. Brand Nubian wisely weights the record heavily toward their best work.
That means that seven of the sixteen songs are off their debut record, 1990’s “All for One”. This is their best record by far and drawing from it heavily is the right decision. Later albums also feature lineup changes, which doesn’t wreck them, but doesn’t help either. Despite some changes, their second record, “In God We Trust” is also solid and accounts for three more tunes here. After that we geta a smattering of content from everything else.
The tunes range on topic, including time honoured rap subjects of race relations, city life and the ever-present “I can rap better than you” which never gets old.
There are a couple of missteps. “Feels So Good” would easily be one of the best songs on the record, but the weird tuneless singing of a large piece of Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” is a poor decision. To be clear, this is not a sample of Joel, this is a re-singing of a stanza from the song. Not only is it awkward (and flat) you can tell from the way it is delivered that even that band thinks it is silly. Next time, leave that shit on the studio outtakes.
Another thing I could live without are the addition of multiple remixes of the same song. It helps that both songs that appear twice (“Slow Down” and “Punk’s Jump Up to Get Beat Down”) are awesome, but I think one version would have been sufficient, and would have also kept the record to a more tasteful 14 tracks overall.
These are minor quibbles, though. Brand Nubian is one of rap’s great artists and this record was not only a thoroughly good time, it filled me with fervour to find more of their studio albums. They are too good for me to sustain myself on the hits alone.
Best tracks: All for One, Concerto in X Minor, Slow Down, Brand Nubian, Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down, Hold On
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