archive.Joe Lamantia.com

It’s to be expected that punk cognoscenti (and — shud­der — would be punk cognoscenti…) would dis­sagree vio­lently over the influ­ences, ori­gins, qual­ity, rel­e­vance, and impor­tance of almost every band that any­one else arro­gat­ing the label ‘punk cognoscenti’ to them­selves has ever had the temer­ity to point to as “sem­i­nal”. (A term which, by the way, may be uniquely suited to punk music by virtue of its ety­mol­ogy). So it’s no sur­prise that even in a set of reviews of Young Loud and Snotty as trite as those offered by Ama­zon patrons, the infight­ing is rife and the gram­mar is bad. Frankly, it’s amus­ing. After all — if you’d buy the album in the first place, would you really care what any­one else thought about it? If ever a music was tor­tured by its own crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial suc­cess, and all the con­com­m­mit­tant dis­pu­ta­tional vagaries, it was punk…

Not nearly so the case with rap and hip-hop, which became wont to use mate­r­ial declaim­ing it’s stars mas­sive mon­e­tary prowess very soon after emerg­ing from the inchoate chaos of block par­ties and DJ duels in Brook­lyn, the Bronx, and many other places that sub­ur­ban white record buy­ers still fear to visit. So it was with­out any taint of gone-rotten-anti-capitalism that I picked up Full Clip, A Decade of Gang Starr at the same moment. I agree with the review on this one — there are sev­eral juicy cuts miss­ing, but the over­all pack­age is an excel­lent ret­ro­spec­tive of what Guru and DJ Pre­mier achieved between ’89 and ’99.

Lastly in the new acqui­si­tions depart­ment, Come With Us makes the drive home from work pos­i­tiv­ely invigorating.