“Become awake and chop the heads of these snakes
It’s better off then dyin’ in a pit full of snakes
Tha snake inside your self, that be the first head you take
It’s better off then dyin in a pit fulla snakes…” (RZA, Pit of Snakes, 1997)
See Bruse Wane, Sean Price & Chris Rivers already understood that jewel, but they preserved the venom on this hot new release from the album ‘Earl Manigault of Rap’… who is Earl Manigault you ask? For the unknowing, he was a legendary street basketball player who was known for his ‘double dunk’, which was a spectacular move where he dunk the ball, catch it with his left hand, switch to his right, and dunk it again, all while still in mid-air. That’s the impression the Caped Crusader wants to give to the listener as they listen to this album. Wane elaborates: “(Earl Manigault of Rap) is for the Hip-Hop lover – those that know what a Hip Hop album is supposed to sound like. Fresh, dope and innovative. I locked in and just touched all bases. Salute to everyone involved in the project, and to the Hip Hop fan all I can say is Enjoy!”
All three MCs manifest into their alter egos: Batman (Wane), Son of the Punisher (Rivers), and The Barbarian (Price) as they utilise their venomous rhymes all over the soulful but banging Kloud Nine Music track. Listen to the track from the jump…
The Earl Manigault of Rap which also features Fam-Illy is available NOW on iTunes. Check the tracklisting and click on the album cover art below to get your copy!
TRACKLISTING:
1. Freedom
2. Hercules
3. The BatMan in a-Minor
4. Ol Head
5. Love Taps
6. M.D.M.A
7. Venom (feat. Sean Price & Chris Rivers}
8. What About the Ladies
9. The Greatest
10. Phenomenal
11. Brighter Days
12. Stand Up
13. Gah Damnit (feat. Fam illy)
14. Yuu
15. The Gifted
On November 14, 2015, this was how I felt, minus the drinking and smoking part – I stopped drinking two and half years ago. I’ve never put a cigarette to my mouth. (Yes I see the gasps out there.) But I could still relate in different ways. I was about to see one of the most respected artists in the game of all time. But let’s go back a month or two before this when it was announced…
I lost my mind when I found out… then some of my FB friends were like, Joey Bad@$$ is performing the same place, same night… the record skipped in my head. Here’s me, never been to the Institute Birmingham, like, so hang on, I got a ticket for Kweli, I did some research, turns out, it was two seperate shows… I thought it was a promoters error… or was it? Read on…
Usually I’m in the venue from the start, but this situation was different, so apologies go out to DJ Tricksta which I am sure pulled off another amazing set before Kweli took the stage, and to Trademark Blud for warming up the show. When I was en route I got a phone call, that the curfew was 10pm. I was like, WHAT? 10pm??? I was used to at least 11pm closes. The first time I saw Busta at Oceana Birmingham back in 2008, Busta didn’t step on stage until 2.45am and rocked the crowd until about 4.15am. Or the Nas & Damian Marley show at the O2 Academy in Birmingham where they finished at midnight and that still stands as one of the greatest shows I had ever witnessed. So I thought ‘nah this is a bluff’.
So I got there at about 8.45pm, Just in time to see Kweli step on stage. At this point I still didn’t clock on, I thought – this man got a catalogue of hits – this show isn’t ending at 10pm… Kicks off the show with LISTEN!!! And believe me, the crowd were listening! Great highlights were Kweli performing some of his Prisoner Of Conscious cuts, particularly ‘Rocket Ships.’ He knew that the track would get the crowd partcipating by throwing their Ws up in honor of the Wu-Tang Production.
Not a bad word has ever been said about Kweli why? Because he speaks the truth, he spoke to the crowd about one of the issues that have been constant in social media and that’s the true definition of the term ‘Black Lives Matter’. It really meant ‘Black Lives Matter AS WELL’. A lot of people got the term twisted and it was great to see the leader of the Blacksmith movement clarify a few things…
Talib did his homework and knew the UK crowd are more in touch with their reggae connections so he too went to that realm. The crowd ate it up. From the reggae/hip hop fusion of Foxy Brown to the true reggae roots of the Marley family, the likes of wish Peter Tosh would be proud of and he doesn’t haave to be sick and tired of hearing ‘darling I love you’, saying that Kweli reached out to his women in attendance with tunes like ‘Come Here’ and ‘Hot Thing’. In the latter, halfway through his DJ flips the beat and to be honest, while many recognize it from Lil’ Kim’s ‘Crush On You’, it didn’t really match with the flow and had heads slightly confused, but that’s just a minor.
Talib more than made up for that slight mishap and went into a string of J Dilla produced tracks that had the crowd wilding. J Dilla ALWAYS WORKS… but considering the catalog of hits he has, I would have rather heard those, big tunes like ‘Move Something’, ‘Hostile Gospel’ and ‘Down For The Count’ were sorely missing from the set. Considering that his new album with 9th Wonder had just been released at time of this review, I thought he would have at least performed ‘Every Ghetto’.
Another hot moment was Kweli’s acknowledgement of Joey Bad@$$ in the same building but on the higher floor and his disdain of the promoters. They booked both artists in the same building but two seperate shows like it was an ‘age’ issue, like the older heads would check for Kweli while the younger generation would more likely check for Bad@$$. That wasn’t the case, although it seemed that Bad@$$ may have took a larger crowd as the Kweli show was comfortably packed, by that I mean the room wasn’t overcrowded like sardines, it had a nice vibe in there.
If you have seen the DVD of Kweli Live at the Shrine, you would know that Kweli openly states that he ends the show with ‘Get By’, but before he performed that and ‘The Blast’, he took a moment out to remember the victims of the terror attacks in France, but also made it important to remember the innocent people caught up in terror attacks around the rest of the world too and not what the media percieves it to be. At time of this review this became a heated discussion among social media users.
So after Get By, the show came to it’s ‘puzzling’ close. People including myself looked either at our wrists or our phones for the time – it said 9:37pm. So here was me, among many others, thinking ‘nah, it can’t be over, he got such more to give.’ we thought he was gonna come back with a surprise or something… the crowd’s chants for Kweli were getting louder and louder… but the DJ came out and told the crowd the show was really over. Naturally this was followed by mutual booing, with a sense of understanding. What made things more bizarre, the Joey Bad@$$ fans were also exiting the building. So that show finished at the same time.
Whether it was bad promoting or the venue’s policies, one thing is for sure: Hip Hop heads may put the brakes on to future acts that may appear at the Birmingham Institute. A 45-minute set is clearly not enough for a man of Kweli’s calibre, that’s the average running time of artists albums., and the 10pm closing time is unforgivable, but what Kweli did inside that 45-mins, he played the hand he dealt and ran with it, and just like the sample in the track – ‘LISTEN!!!’ He gave us a show that had us in the end saying…’Wait wait wait WAIT JUST A MINUTE!’
ANTE UP! YAP THAT FOOL! ANTE UP! KIDNAP THAT FOOL!
What M.O.P. didn’t tell you was ‘Don’t try this in Brooklyn, or see what happens to you!’
That’s the case with the new Philly Spielberg directed video from V.Nova, which tells the story of his peoples getting robbed, Nova and M.O.P. find the people who did this and their consequences are not very pleasant. Who says Neighbourhood Watch doesn’t work?
Nova realised his vision by releasing the Hidden In Plain Sight in a trilogy of mixtapes, now he turns his attention to releasing a new studio album since 2007 with R.A.P.: Radio Advanced Poetry. ‘If I Ever Knew’ is taken from the new album ‘Koch Era’ coming soon, which features guests such as Shabaam Sahdeeq and Dark Lo.
The one half of rap duo – BOE & Villa describes the Crack Factory produced single as “another legendary stamp on my feature passport.”
Peep the video below…
While M.O.P.s Lil Fame calls himself rap’s Peter Tosh, and like the reggae legend, Nova is sick and tired about all this ‘skinny jean and Autotune era, hide behind your crew era before you fight, you shoot era’.
Nova has worked with a who’s who of artists in the industry, such as Funkmaster Flex, Papoose, Erick Sermon, Denaun Porter of D12 and most notably Rakim. Look out for more hits from this man on future RePPiN4U Hip Hop Shows on the BDSIR NETWORK.
You can find out more on V.Nova by clicking on the banner below.
What if I told you, that the making of this classic dated back to the year I was born? It might be a 20th Anniversary special but this is 35 years in the making.
On November 11, 2015 we mark the 35th Anniversary of Shogun Assassin. A film about a man and his son who escape and go on a violent journey after the wife of the Shogun’s Decapitator was murdered. The violent scenes were ahead of its time and was later banned in 1983 by various countries. It would later resurface in the year 2000 and was available for free for consumers who purchased Kill Bill Vol.1 on Initial DVD release.
I had a friend back in the 90s who was fascinated with banned films and went on a personal conquest to hunt them down. This film was one of them. I must have watched this a few months prior to the release of GZA’s Liquid Swords. After the Raekwon album, I decided to go on my own personal quest: To own every single Wu-Tang release. With the seemingly ever-growing affiliation of Wu Killah Bees, maybe I have underestimated the clan’s domination in Hip Hop.
This is MY STORY. This is the 20th Anniversary of The GZA/Genius – Liquid Swords.
A miserable November night, cassette inserted in the Walkman, full Duracell batteries, headphones over my head with the sellotape on it to hold the phones together, my paper round begins. And as soon as it comes on, I have that ‘Wu-Tang moment again’… Oh Snap – The Wu-Tang have sat down and watched this (Shogun Assassin)! You instantly imagine the Clan actually sitting down and watching the same film you just did, and you’re just mind blown. If you haven’t seen the film RZA samples, you make it your duty it find out which one it was. That was the beauty of being a fan those days and even now.
LIQUID SWORDS
First time I heard this, the album wasn’t out yet. I heard it on my friend’s cassette from the radio. He was raving on about GZA’s new tune, saying the tune is ‘dark’… back then the word dark was slang for ‘good’, like the youth today use the word ‘sick’ as slang for good. I heard it and I LOST IT (my mind). The beat was on some tick-tock-tick-tock business, and the hook has gone on to become one of my favourite hooks of all time. I didn’t even know the tune was called Liquid Swords because the tracks were not arranged in the album inlay. You had to kind of, match the song with the title, and I don’t care what anybody says, you are not a Wu fan if you didn’t fantasize about performing on a big clock (hence the beat) while your friend breaks the wack records across the wall.
DUEL OF THE IRON MIC
My best memory of this was the Wu-Tang Disciples of the 36 Chambers DVD, or you have seen him live. If you haven’t, watch this DVD. Look at GZA while he’s performing this. The man is ‘IN THE ZONE’. Screwface and all. That’s how you gotta be when you’re on the microphone. If that is not your reaction, you’re not hip hop! This tune is major in the Wu shows. Should have been an official video. GZA even said in an interview that this was his favourite track on the album. CASE CLOSED.
LIVING IN THE WORLD TODAY
Sometimes I love when a clansman (in this case Meth) is featured in a cameo but doesn’t actually drop a verse,even though it would be nice if he did. Almost as catchy as the Liquid Swords hook, I like the little touches in this, the ‘Chic-POW!’ in the hook, the emphasis in GZA’s voice when he says the line ‘you’ll be hearing the slang what the WUU-TAANG say’… This was my favourite track on the album at one point. Don’t you just love albums where your favourite track changes almost daily? That’s when you know you got a great album.
GOLD
I could be wrong, but I think this is the album’s most underrated track. Of all the tracks people post on social media, I don’t see Gold posted as much.
Funny thing about this was, I had always prefered the remix featuring D’Angelo. But this tune right here was a personal moment. GZA had come to Birmingham Ballroom in February of 2012. He was performing this and he came over to my side, fans reciting the lyrics as we do, I said the line ‘Therefore, your 52 hand-blocks was useless.’, GZA heard me say that, and took my camera out of my hands and filmed himself with us – the Wu-Nited Kingdom/RePPiN4U family. That was the start of the surreal interactivity with the clan that I had… it really feels like the 20 years of being a Wu fan was paying off in an unexpected way.
LABELS
The irony of this tune 20 years later is crazy. Before I get into that, just like Cold World, I prefered the remix over this so admittedly I felt slightly disappointed when this version was on the album initially. The version I heard on radio (Yes people, hip hop existed on radio – I know what you mean by those memes but RePPiN4U is out to crush all that) sounded like a run down sports car on the verge of crashing. The album version sounded a lot more cleaner. Anyway back to the irony. Bear in mind it was over 20 years ago, The first line that comes out of GZA’s mouth – ‘Tommy Ain’t My Muthaf***!n Boy, When he fake moves on a n!&&@ he employ…’ The year is 2015 and Ghostface Killah scored another classic with 36 Seasons, and Method Man received critical acclaim with ‘The Meth Lab’, both released under Tommy Boy Records. But Labels sparked off two things: One, some Wu fans discovered that through that one line, there was a first album entitled ‘Words From The Genius which was released before 36 Chambers and in the process discovered RZA’s first album ‘Oooh We Love You Rakeem’. The other thing it sparked, was the art of name dropping in songs. GZA wasn’t the first to do it but it was the style of how he did it, Publicity from Beneath The Surface was just as good, but Fame in my opinion from the Legend of The Liquid Sword album was the one that did it for me,
4th CHAMBER
I could be wrong here but I think Wu-Tang were the first to fuse two tracks together in a video the point where fans actually wanted that version. Inspectah Deck & U-God are usually credited for being the best posse cut starters (kick off the tune wih the first rhyme). But Ghostface should get props as well. He kicked off 9 Milli Bros on his Fishscale album, Bring The Ruckus from 36 Chambers, and most notably this track. Sometimes I’ve seen Ghost almost forget it’s him that sets the tune off as it drops after the response of capacity crowd jumping up and down as high as they can under RZA’s command.
SHADOWBOXIN’
At this time Method Man was still my favourite Wu-member. This tune dropped along with Wu-Gambinos on Cuban Linx album – I noticed subtle changes in meth’s voice, like he lost a bit of that raspy effect in his voice when he was saying the rhymes. Listen to Meth on 36 Chambers then listen to him on this track and you will see what I mean. TRUE STORY – I was in my last year at school. They installed internet in the school – it was a dial-up connection – OLD SCHOOL! We were supposed to use it in our own time to work on our Record of Achievement – remember that? Back in the day we used to use that to get jobs. I don’t know if the youth today use it, but if they don’t, put it like this: If you had one of these (pictured right) YOUR CHILDHOOD WAS AWESOME!
Back to the story. Me & my school friend (Paul Whittaker) were meant to work on this… we used that time to find the lyrics to Shadowboxin’ and other Wu tracks and that’s how we discovered Ohhla.com (Original Hip Hop Lyrics Archive). We printed off as much as we could til one day we got caught by the teacher… I remember the name – Mr Collett – he said he was gonna take these explicit lyrics and show our parents. 20 years later my moms knows nothing about this… put it that way! He was probably a closet Wu fan himself!
HELL’S WIND STAFF
I think Wu Fans know the story behind this track now…originally a track on the album, it became a skit, and then actually manifested as a track on Wu-Tang Forever. The other question remains – What happened to the ‘Unexplained’? Meant to be a track on the album but it seemed to have manifested on the Gravediggaz ‘Pick, Sickle, Shovel’ album. Do you know a Don Rodriquez? No? Yes you do. We ALL know a Don Rodriquez. There he is, snitching to Mark Zuckerberg about what you post on your Facebook. Great album sequencing here, as this leads into…
KILLAH HILLS 10304
…with a few references to Tony Starks… We already know Tony and Lou (Ghost & Rae) are the mafioso kingpins of the clan, but it was good to see RZA & GZA put their spin on things, complete with one of my favourite RZA traits which was let the beat ride out, and when you hear that, you hear RZA ‘playing about’ on the keyboard… yeah, I miss those times too.
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS
The Wu-Tang have 6 million ways to influence us. Today I don’t say – ‘I’m gonna investigate the problem’, I say (and it happens naturally) ‘I’m making Investigative Reports’, and the summoning of Tony Starks has brought him forth and it couldn’t happen without Rae, with additional support from U-God.
SWORDSMAN
This was the tune that eventually would become my true favourite on the album, if Bruce Lee explained his theory of ‘Emotional Content’ into song, it would sound like this. Not only could I feel it in GZA’s voice, but I felt the same way. It was haunting, it was thought provoking, and even though past Wu tracks spoke of the 5%, this was the one that caught my attention. I started looking at people different when GZA said the lines – “I suffered brutal pain, from whips and chains/Punishments that were set to wash the brain/So look listen observe and also respect this jewel/Drawed up, detect and reflect this/Light I shine, because my powers is refined/Through the truth, which manifest through eternal minds…” I love this hook more than the Liquid Swords one –The hook had me really want to slap people in their face like Batman and it relates up to this day when people try to put your boy down… then it turns out that the real title of this tune was indeed – UNEXPLAINED… which makes more sense but at the same time, ‘They say he’s a Swordsman’…
I GOTCHA BACK
This brings me back to the days of Yo! MTV Raps…those annoying nights when I’m hitting record on the video recorder, cranking the volume up but my moms telling me to turn it down… funny how mom told me crank it up when Lost Boyz ‘Music Makes Me High’ came on! But at this point I didn’t even clock on that a GZA album was coming. As far as I was concerned, this was for the movie ‘Fresh’, and I remember that film as plain as day. Back in the day, Swordsman/Unexplained became my favourite track, after that, admittedly I couldn’t listen to I Gotcha Back… nothing against it, just that Swordsman/Unexplained to me was becoming too personal!
B.I.B.L.E. Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth
I never heard this tune til 1998 when Killah Priest dropped his first album – Heavy Mental. I had the cassette tape of Liquid Swords and Cassette tapes didn’t usually have bonus tracks. I didn’t convert to CDs until it was clear that cassette tapes were extremely hard to get in my area. I didn’t even have a CD player. I had to play CDs from my Sega Saturn… I miss that console. I could play a tune such as this and zone out – and when I did, the Sega Saturn’s screen saver was a spaceship travelling through space, remember that? So technically, I read the Basic Instructions Before Leaving earth and then took off in my spaceship!
Congratulations to The GZA for finally making it platinum after 20 years…. but what I wanna know is, if millions of Wu-Tang Fans around the world consider this a classic (and it is…) why has it only gone platinum now? Don’t get me wrong, RePPiN4U cares not for album sales, but we as fans post about Liquid Swords everyday… some of us consider it a classic over Cuban Linx… surely there are more than a million Wu fans… and that’s just in the states alone!
Take a bow Gary Grice, it’s all about that Dark Matter now… the salute the man who could be responsible for finally derailing the mighty 50 Cent off his game (Paper Plates). Let’s be real, he hasn’t been the same since that day has he? 50 always loved slaying MCs across the neck with his diss records, he did that to hear that sound of wailing winds, but to have it happen to his own neck, was just…. ridiculous…at least to him!
See Bruse Wane, Sean Price & Chris Rivers already understood that jewel, but they preserved the venom on this hot new release from the album ‘Earl Manigault of Rap’… who is Earl Manigault you ask? For the unknowing, he was a legendary street basketball player who was known for his ‘double dunk’, which was a spectacular move where he dunk the ball, catch it with his left hand, switch to his right, and dunk it again, all while still in mid-air. That’s the impression the Caped Crusader wants to give to the listener as they listen to this album. Wane elaborates: “(Earl Manigault of Rap) is for the Hip-Hop lover – those that know what a Hip Hop album is supposed to sound like. Fresh, dope and innovative. I locked in and just touched all bases. Salute to everyone involved in the project, and to the Hip Hop fan all I can say is Enjoy!” 
On November 14, 2015, this was how I felt, minus the drinking and smoking part – I stopped drinking two and half years ago. I’ve never put a cigarette to my mouth. (Yes I see the gasps out there.) But I could still relate in different ways. I was about to see one of the most respected artists in the game of all time. But let’s go back a month or two before this when it was announced…
So after Get By, the show came to it’s ‘puzzling’ close. People including myself looked either at our wrists or our phones for the time – it said 9:37pm. So here was me, among many others, thinking ‘nah, it can’t be over, he got such more to give.’ we thought he was gonna come back with a surprise or something… the crowd’s chants for Kweli were getting louder and louder… but the DJ came out and told the crowd the show was really over. Naturally this was followed by mutual booing, with a sense of understanding. What made things more bizarre, the Joey Bad@$$ fans were also exiting the building. So that show finished at the same time.
RePPiN 4U 