CD Odyssey Disc 1770: Brand Nubian

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 30^th 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

CD Odyssey Disc 1524: Brand Nubian

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