After a couple of bad night’s sleep in a row, I’m feeling a bit worn down. Nevertheless, I recognize the sacred contract I have with you, dear readers, to fill your heads with nifty music ideas or – failing that – at least empty mine of same. It gets crowded up there sometimes.
Disc 1770 is…One for All
Artist: Brand Nubian
Year of Release: 1990
What’s up with the Cover? The boys pose under a pergola. This is almost exactly the same album cover as on “The Very Best of Brand Nubian” (reviewed at Disc 1524). For clever pergola observations, please check there.
You can also play “find all the differences” between the photos on that album and this one. Notable, the skyline looks a bit darker through the pergola in this cover, and the dude in the back (sorry – I don’t know my band members by sight) is upright instead of leaning.
Also of note, the warning label features prominently on “One For All” whereas it is wholly absent on the “best of” album cover. I assume it was explicit for 1990 but by the time the Greatest Hits record rolled around twenty years later, all the bad words weren’t bad anymore. Then, when the record turned 30, the words were bad again. It’s all very confusing.
How I Came To Know It: As noted on the “best of” review, I learned about these guys through a former coworker named Adrienne and her husband. I despaired finding the original album and after a bad encounter with a sanitized “clean version”(no warning label) I settled for a ‘best of a few years ago.
Then, lo and behold, I found this 30th anniversary version by happy accident while digging in the “miscellaneous B section at the local record store.
How It Stacks Up: this is my only Brand Nubian studio album, so it can’t stack up. As earlier noted, I previously owned “In God We Trust” but it was the clean version and I couldn’t abide that. I remain on the lookout for that record, but with the warning label.
Ratings: 4 stars
While this is my only Brand Nubian studio album, I like my chances that this is their best. Exhibit A – six of the sixteen tracks on my “best of” compilation find their original home on “One for All”. Exhibit B – this record is dope.
As noted on previous reviews, Brand Nubian is rap from the golden age, when word wizardry was the order of the day, before hip hop got lazy and relied on heavily borrowed pop hooks (one man's opinion). Which is not to say Brand Nubian don’t sample pop hooks on “One for All” because they totally do. But they do it with an art and precision that repurposes those hooks, bits and pieces into something wholly new. The hook may still appear, but it is used differently, creating something new while also providing the backdrop to the reason you really came to listen – the word flow brilliance of the emcees.
As noted on previous reviews we have three emcees in the band, Grand Puba, Sadat X and Lord Jamar, and they are all great, bouncing in and out of each other’s flow without ever tripping each other up. It is the hip hop equivalent of a good bluegrass song: everyone gets a turn to shine, and the whole ends up greater than the sum of the parts.
It isn’t always cool to reference what samples you hear on a rap tune, but this stuff is widely quoted, and the way “Slow Down” repurposes a famous Edie Brickell tune is pure bohemian brilliance. You hear all the original greatness, but better. It’s not imitation, it’s inspiration.
For the most part the songs that are anthologized later are the record’s best (among them on this listen I appreciated “Drop the Bomb” in a way I apparently missed in my review back in 2021), but there are also many deep cuts that are very much worth your time. “Ragtime” comes immediately mind but there are plenty of good ones.
The biggest sin on “One for All” is the length. At 16 tracks and 73 minutes it is just a bit too long, and the record would have benefited from four fewer tracks and a tight dozen tunes. Know when to say when because just because CD technology can hold 80 minutes of music, doesn’t always mean it should.
This is a minor quibble though, and “One for All” is rightly appreciated as an early rap classic that has aged very well indeed.
Best tracks: All for One, Concerto in X Minor, Ragtime, Slow Down, Brand Nubian
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