This first instalment in the career retrospective of Latino crate-diggers Junkyard Ju Ju and Psycho Les is more or less the final funeral procession for a style of hip-hop that has now become the preserve of nostalgic obsessives.
Expect compilations featuring the likes of the D.I.T.C crew, Black Moon, Pete Rock & C L Smooth, Brand Nubian and others to follow in the wake of this book-end to an era. What's changed in hip-hop is, of course, that the past is 'out' and the future is very much 'in'. And The Beatnuts and their ilk, with their passion for discovering the well-buried roots of their music and crafting club tracks from them, no longer appear to be quite as exciting as they once were.
What this collection, which shuffles old and new alongside each other, illustrates is the consistency with which The Beatnuts have pumped out jazz-sampling party tunes over the past decade. They've never swapped their hedonistic themes for social ones, never traded crate-diggin' for knob-twiddling. Along the way there have been party anthems as fine as 'Off The Books', 'Props Over Here', 'Get Funky' and Method Man hook-up 'Se Acabo Remix'.
Still, they can at times lack the bite of Showbiz & AG at their finest or the focussed funk of Brand Nubian's string of classic '93 releases, even Diamond D's underground gem 'Stunts, Blunts & Hip-Hop'. What they do have by the bucket though, is fun. Genuine fun, fun expressed through the music not acres of tape bowing under the weight of distinctly un-hilarious skits.
Chances are that you either know The Beatnuts and have all this stuff tucked into your pile of dusty records already or you have no idea what we're babbling about. If it's the latter, then, as an introduction to a moment in hip-hop when the music reached one of its many glorious peaks, this will do nicely.
