#uptown Saturday night

[todayinhiphophistory]

Today in Hip Hop History:

Camp Lo released their debut album Uptown Saturday Night January 28, 1997

[boricuacherry-blog]

[roseillith]

Camp Lo Uptown Saturday Night (1997)

[madamshogunassassin]

Luchini AKA This Is It - Camp Lo (1996)

[oldshowbiz]

you make a good point rosa m. gray

[beatsforbrothels]

Camp Lo - Sparkle

[schlock-luster-video]

Remembering horror and blaxploitation film icon Calvin Lockhart on the anniversary of his death.

R.I.P. (1934 - 2007)

[cinemajunkie70]

A very happy birthday in the afterlife to Sidney Poitier!

[mywifeleftme]

53: Camp Lo // Uptown Saturday Night

Uptown Saturday Night Camp Lo 1997, Profile

There’s an old Donald Glover bit about how people who rave about ‘80s hip-hop need to go back and actually listen to it, because it’s mostly just guys saying shit like, (in a Melle Mel candence) “Well I went to the hat store todayyyy / and I got myself a hat / ha HA!” I think of ‘80s rap as equivalent to ‘50s rock: it’s raw and exciting stuff, but for the modern listener it’s bound to feel a little primitive because you’re hearing a genre before its techniques and technology have fully matured. And that makes the ‘90s hip-hop’s equivalent of rock’s ‘60s, the first decade when artists had a fixed foundation to build upon, and the genre exploded into a psychedelic variety of styles that has continued to expand to this day.

Camp Lo had as idiosyncratic and unprecedented a sound on their debut Uptown Saturday Night as Wu-Tang Clan, OutKast, Digable Planets, or the Beastie Boys did. Released in a year when Juicy Couture velour defined urban style, Camp Lo’s emcees were duded up like Blaxploitation-era pimps, spitting a thieves’ argot studded with references spanning 70 years of New York culture. Their beats, largely provided by DJ Ski, were sparkling boom bap that pulled as much from Roy Ayers as James Brown. According to Ski, Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba talked to each other in the same impenetrable slang they rapped in, bringing to mind the phenomenon of twin language:

Check the queen bee, Lady Ree digging Grace Check the place 3 o’clock. Shot? No, we ain’t Fret and cock, bring it in the paint? No such thing Flash the dynamite, sing my superfly to the Cleopatra in the casino with gold sugar Dig my harlequin and drench you in my Donald Goines (from “Coolie High”)

Short of discovering some remote enclave in the Bronx where people talk like this, it’s safe to assume Suede and Cheeba had developed a mutually-reinforcing linguistic bond, where (to pull a quote from that twin language story) “words are invented and abbreviated or restricted codes are used because full explanations are redundant.” Though there were a few emcees with more variable flows, nobody in the game sounded slicker than Camp Lo.

As fly as the rhymes are, Uptown Saturday Night is a producer’s showcase. Though he doesn’t get touted as frequently as Pete Rock, DJ Premier, or Large Professor, DJ Ski is as great a producer as New York has ever produced. Dusty literary journal The Kenyon Review, of all places, published a great (and uncredited?) piece on Ski’s beats for Camp Lo a few years back that’s worth reading. Here’s the writer on Uptown closer “Sparkle (Mr. Midnight Mix)”:

“Appearing at a time when boom bap beats were at their peak, the song has no drums, but somehow still has a very high nod factor. Extremely low in the mix are what sound like the original drums, so low that they might only be audible because of headphone bleed in the vocal track. But it is really the flow of Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba that retains the rhythm of the original, heavily swung drums. The vocals thus carry a ghost rhythm propelling the track forward, even as the vibes and fluid, filtered bass and piano lines lazily rise and fall, cresting here, submerged there.”

Great shit. Uptown covers a lot of stylistic ground, though high-rolling party tunes are the order of the day, like “Luchini (This is It)” with an irresistible trumpet loop launching itself off a thwacking snare hit. Nearly every beat on the record is indelible, from the kaiju-sized horns of “Krystal Karrington” to the cooing, vibe-chilled “Coolie High” (a preview of Ski’s 2010s work on Curren$y’s classic Pilot Talk trilogy). And, on the warped Twilight Zone-sampling “Negro League,” Ski even seems to have an ear on the off-kilter underground sound El-P was creating with Company Flow.

Various forms of fuckery on the part of Camp Lo’s label conspired to prevent the band from following up on Uptown Saturday Night till 2002, and by then it was too late to recapture their former momentum. They’ve had sparks of inspiration in the decades since, but we’ll never know whether the magic of their debut would’ve been reproducible under better circumstances. Regardless, Uptown Saturday Night has a place among the greatest records of rap’s first golden decade.

53/365

[bobbyskizza]

This was used as the cover to Marvin Gayes I Want You and then in 1997 Camp Lo released their album Uptown Saturday Night with cover art inspired by it by New York graffiti artist Dr Revolt.

Then in 2016 Marvel had a bunch of variant covers inspired by Hip-hop albums. Ed Piskor used Uptown Saturday Night as the basis for his variant cover for All-New X-Men #1.

The Sugar Shack

Ernie Barnes (African-American,1938-2009)

[movieposters1]

[todayinhiphophistory]

Today in Hip Hop History:

Camp Lo released their debut album Uptown Saturday Night January 28, 1997

[boricuacherry-blog]

[sheabuttaqueen444]

[schlock-luster-video]

Remembering cult cinema icon Rosalind Cash on the anniversary of her date of birth.

R.I.P. (1938 - 1995)