Kevin Madison aka K-Solo was the harder edge of the EPMD collective The Hit Squad who recorded 2 albums in the early 90′s. His 1990 debut Tell the World My Name was entirely produced by EPMD with Parrish Smith handling the majority of the work but Erick Sermon adding the classic opening track ‘Spellbound’. Vocally Solo was reminiscent of Big Daddy Kane with a high-speed hard delivery that, coupled with his storytelling style, vividly illuminated his adventures in prison, flirtation with crack, racism and of course sexual exploits.

Solo briefly became famous for his ‘Spellbound/Letterman’ style which entailed crafting his rhymes around the spelling out of words to create a delayed reaction punchline as the listener would take an extra second or so to decode the spelled out word.

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Spellbound would lead to one of the biggest beefs of the time between Solo and former cellmate DMX who also recorded a track entitled Spellbound featuring spelled out wordplay. DMX claimed that K-Solo had stolen the concept for Spellbound from him when they were inside together whilst Solo responded by claiming it was X who had bit his style and lost a freestyle battle to him in jail.

Solo even went as far as taking a lie detector test in the Beef II documentary to prove his claims, but the feud was never settled and the two traded diss tracks down the years. Unfortunately for Solo, by then few were checking for his name. After splitting from Hit Squad in ’93 following EPMD’s demise and signing to Death Row without releasing any material, he spent the rest of the 90′s as a ‘guest’ rapper often dissin’ his former friends.

Trivia

K-Solo stands for Kevin Self Organisation Left Others

K-Solo claims to have brought Keith Murray and Rockwilder into the Hit Squad family

Trained as a boxer and has offered to fight both DMX and Keith Murray in a ‘cage match’

Changed his style in the mid 90′s to sound harder and guested on Redman’s Muddy Waters LP

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Singles

Fugitive

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Spellbound

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Your Mom’s in My Business

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Slang Dictionary

Not much I think he says Phat once

90s Guy says

K-Solo was one of the most talented rappers in The Hit Squad and one of the more talented rappers of the 90′s to fall by the wayside. His later gruff ‘hardcore’ vocals showed that style eventually triumphed over substance and that the labels were only interested in pushing gangsta personas. Personally I preferred his storytelling rhymes over his gimmicky ‘spelling bee’ style but the dude would’ve smashed it on Countdown still. Shame he didn’t do more but he still managed to squeeze out this classic and ‘Times Up’ before EPMD split and fractured the Hit Squad.

90s Guy Favourites

All the singles above plus;

Tales from the Crack Side Tales from the crack side

Real Solo Please stand Up Real solo please stand up

Renee Renee Renee Renee

In fact just download the whole album below!

Link

On the DL

HipHopDX Interview

EPMD – Business As Usual (1990 Def Jam recordings)

After going gold with their debut and sophomore albums EPMD still hadn’t made bank thanks to some typical financial mismanagement and exploitation by those good people over at Sleeping Bag Records, but with their contracts ripped up, and the ink barely dry on a new deal at Def Jam, they came out with another typically classic album: Business as Usual. As the name suggests they wanted to reassure their fans that nothing had changed and they were still the funkified rap pioneers they knew and loved, except for one thing – they were now ‘bigger and deffer’.

By 1990 the sound of hip hop was noticeably maturing and this album was another quantum leap in terms of production, with EPMD illustrating the move away from the simple ‘two turntables and a drum machine’ style to making themselves at home in a modern studio. The production values are elevated on this album; the bass lines are crisper and louder, the drums are tougher, the mastering adds to the clarity and the samples drop like anvils, even the scratches are getting more tech.

Rather than rely on one clever sample looped over a programmed beat, Erick and Parish cut and pasted a plethora of classic soul and funk soundbites over sampled and filtered drum loops. You just have to listen to the hook on my favourite track ‘Manslaughter’ and try to decipher how many different samples are being used to see what I mean. The left and right panning on the James Brown intro to Gold Digger is yet another sign of the improved technology that the Def Jam studios offered to the rap duo.

The soundscapes are also noticeably darker as illustrated by the fact that both ‘Brothers on my Jock’ and ‘Underground’ were later reworked into moody New York mid-90s classics by Wu Tang and Black Moon respectively. The flow patterns are perhaps the only thing that remained true to their two previous installments, but any criticisms of the duo’s rap style can be offset by the shrewd choice of a then unknown youngster from Newark. No, it wasn’t Shaq! It was Redman of course, and his unique style drags the two tracks he is featured on into firmly into the 90s style that we would become so accustomed to over the next few years.

Trivia

First album on Def Jam

First official appearance by Redman

Singles

Gold Digger

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Rampage

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Give the People

Slang dictionary

Fly, Wack, Jock, Bozack, Phat, Jam, Props, Lampin, (Mom/Pop) Dukes, Daddy mack, Booty

90s Guy says

I was about 13 when I first heard this album as it didn’t make it into my world until 1991/2 when I lent it off my best mates older brother after he called me a ‘bozack’ and I still don’t think I worked out what ‘Mr Bozack’ was until about a year later. A bit like the quickening in ‘Highlander’ lots of things seemed to make sense after I realised these guys were talking about their dicks. In fact all hip hop of the time was a kind of code that you didn’t quite understand but were desperate to decode.

Sometimes this was for slang or colloquial reasons but often for transatlantic reasons – we weren’t aware of some of the people Rappers were referencing (Tony Danza, Karl Malone, Urkel, Vanessa Del Rio weren’t exactly household names in the UK), but that also made you lot cooler if you could dig it. Its hard to imagine nowadays people not understanding hip hop slang and not being exposed to the worldwide dominance of American pop culture but Hip Hop was still underground music back in the nine oh.

90s Guy Favourites

Manslaughter Manslaughter

Brothers on my jock brothers-on-my-jock

Underground underground

Funky piano funky-piano

Rampage, Give the people

Review

Rap Reviews back to the lab

Link

Listen for yourself

On the DL