Born Allah - "Someone to Hate" b/w "Laid in Full" (Ill Boogie Records, 2000)
For heads in the know, South Central Los Angeles’ Good Life Café
is legendary for the open mic nights held there throughout the 90s. The Good
Life open mics spawned such legends as the Freestyle Fellowship, Jurassic 5
(who formed at the Good Life out of the ashes of the Unity Committee and the
Rebels of Rhythm), and Abstract Rude, but the attention these well-known Good
Life alums have gotten over the last twenty years has obscured the diversity
and talent of other artists associated with venue. The battle-centric
environment of the café required participants to develop their own unique
styles. Boring the crowd or biting another rapper’s style invariably led the
audience to chant “Please pass the mic” until the rapper made way for the next
on the schedule.[1] As
a result, the Good Life fostered not only the tag-team old school reverence of
Jurassic 5 and Freestyle Fellowship’s revolutionary flows, but also Ganjah K’s
low budget G-funk and Volume 10’s unhinged gangsta posturing.[2]
The audiences didn’t care what style of hip hop the performers made as long as
it was fresh and original.
Born Allah reached the third and best phase of his career as
a frequent presence at the Good Life. He first garnered attention as he made
the rounds in the late 80s Los Angeles battle-rap circuit under the name MC
Kool while still in high school. Toward the end of high school, his mom sent
him to live with his dad in Bronx. His neighborhood was heavily Five Percenter,
and he found knowledge of self and renamed himself Lord Mustafa and began
shifting his lyrical focus from battling to political topics and the tenets of
Five Percenter ideology. Soon after his enlightenment, he hooked up with a
producer named King Born Allah (also a Five Percenter) with whom he formed the
duo Movement Ex. Movement Ex was the first hip hop act signed directly to
Columbia Records, the last major label to jump on the hip hop bandwagon
(although it had previously distributed Def Jam Records). The group’s self-titled
debut is a fine piece of post-Public Enemy political rap[3],
but neither the beats nor Lord Mustafa’s rapping are really distinct on more
than a few tracks. They recorded a second album, which Columbia shelved.
Movement Ex subsequently split up, and Lord Mustafa moved back to Los Angeles,
where he quickly fell in with the Good Life crowd.
Performing at the Good Life put Lord Mustafa back in touch
with his roots as a battle rapper, and he needed a new moniker to reflect his
resurgent battle rap style (in contrast to his Movement Ex style), as well as
his knowledge of self. He settled on Born Allah. Unlike Freestyle Fellowship, Volume
10, Mystik Journeymen, Abstract Rude, and others, Born Allah didn’t manage to
get an album out during the Good Life era (to this day, he still does not have
a solo album out), although he did record an album’s worth of material for Ill
Boogie Records in the late 90s. In spite of his lack of recorded material, he
became a legend on the battle circuit, competing ably with Aceyalone, Myka 9,
and other titanic battlers. He got further exposure as a frequent guest and
freestyler on the Wake Up Show with Sway & King Tech throughout the second
half of the 90s. Finally, in 2000, he finally put out two 12” singles, which
together make up the entirety of his released output as a solo artist. The
first, “Patience,” is a split with Grand Agent and DJ Revolution, but the
second, “Someone to Hate” b/w “Laid in Full,” is entirely solo and is the best
showcase for his skills on wax.
Like many of the artists who came out of the Good Life, Born
Allah’s one solo 12” doesn’t seem beholden to any one region. The beats by
M-Boogie sound classically New York, with hard drums and chopped samples, as do
the cuts and scratches by DJ Revolution, while Born Allah’s rapping is very
much in line with the Good Life battle style of the Freestyle Fellowship.[4]
It’s a testament to Born Allah’s skill as a battle rapper that his songs and his
Wake Up Show freestyles would be difficult to tell apart were it not for the
presence of choruses and scratch hooks on the former. On “Someone to Hate”
especially, it sounds like he had just heard some wack rappers and jumped
straight into the booth to freestyle about how terrible they are. “Laid in Full”
treads in similar subject matter, but the song is considerably less intense
both in terms of the beat and Born Allah’s flow.
Ultimately though, it’s not difficult to figure out why Freestyle
Fellowship, Abstract Rude, J5, and others managed to be so prolific during the
90s while Born Allah struggled to get records out. Those artists wrote exciting,
original songs that practically beg listeners to return to their albums again
and again. By contrast, while he recorded a lot of material that has gone
unreleased, his one solo single showcases a very good battle rapper with relatively
unexciting songwriting. On the Wake Up Show, Born Allah distinguished himself
as one of the best freestylers around, but when it came to making his own
material he struggled to keep listeners (and, more crucially, record label
executives) engaged. He has mentioned in recent interviews promoting his
current group, the Tabernacle MC’z, that he plans to release a compilation of
his unreleased 90s material under the name The
Lost Scrolls, and it will be very interesting to see if this material
stands up to that of his Good Life colleagues. Until then, we only have “Someone
to Hate” b/w “Paid in Full,” which is a valuable example of the diversity of
styles fostered by the Good Life.
"Someone to Hate"
"Laid in Full"
As a bonus, here is one of Born Allah's Wake Up Show freestyles from 1996
[1]
Audiences at the Good Life were unrelenting in their “Please pass the mic”
chants. Fat Joe showed up at the Good Life one night after releasing his very
good first album Represent in 1993.
Apparently overly cocky about his recent success, he got onstage, kicked a wack
freestyle and broke the café’s no cursing rule, and was forced to relinquish
the mic by an audience that didn’t care at all that he was the most famous
rapper in the room.
[2]
There’s so much great G-funk out there that doesn’t have the high budget gloss
of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic or even MC
Eiht’s We Come Strapped. Ganjah K and
many others will eventually be highlighted in this series down the line.
[3] The
album’s singles were titled “Freedom Got a Shotgun” and “United Snakes of
America.” Both are good songs, but when listening to them it isn’t hard to see
why likeminded groups like Public Enemy and X-Clan overshadowed Movement Ex.
[4] See
P.E.A.C.E. and Self Jupiter’s verses on Freestyle Fellowship’s “Bullies of the
Block”
No comments:
Post a Comment