Every Wednesday, in honor of Ed Lover Dance Day from Yo! MTV Raps, I take a break from rock and roll to write a little bit about hip hop. In the late 80s and early 90s hip hop ruled my musical life. During this often called 'Golden Era' I discovered so much incredible music. As I am slowly replacing the CDs I've had for thirty plus years with vinyl copies, I'm going to talk about some albums that had a really important impact on me during some very formative years.
This is another one of those albums that's been in my backlog to write about for ages. 90s Tapes rereleased this back in 2023. Even though that doesn't necessarily make this the most timely time to write about From Where???, it has given me a good amount of time to sit with a record I had never heard before picking up.
The story goes is that Mad Skillz debut album, packed with top tier producers and guest appearances, was dropped in 1996 the same day as a 2 Pac record and The Fugees. This led to it being drastically overshadowed and resulted in Mad Skillz being dropped. Which led to him changing his name to just Skillz and taking another swing at things in the early 2000s. By 1996, I wasn't paying attention to hip hop at all really, so I wasn't aware of this album. I'm not sure how I would have felt about it if I had heard it at the time. I think that if From Where??? had dropped in 1993, I would have been into it.
We've got a rogues gallery of producers on here including Large Professor, The Beatnuts, Buckwild and J Dilla. They've put together an album that's full of cool and interesting beats that are way better than the bulk of production that was happening in 1996. That said, it does still suffer from slow-tempo-itis for the bulk of the album. Don't get me wrong, it's good. It's very good, in fact, if you think about the year it came out. But I'm always going to be more interested in an album that has some higher bpm numbers.
Lyrically, Mad Skillz can really hold it down. He reminds me a lot of Maestro Fresh Wes in his voice, cadence and subject matter. He spends a lot of time talking about how good he is in relation to his geography. Just as Maestro Fresh Wes liked to spit about how good he was despite being from Canada, Mad Skillz treads similar territory, but swapping Canada for Virginia. This isn't a dig. I love Maestro Fresh Wes, so if you have something in common with him, I'm going to be OK with that. Guest verses by the aforementioned Large Pro and Q-Tip don't hurt either.
This is a fun record. I wish it was a little faster and had it come out a few years earlier it probably would have been. Considering the desert that 1996 hip hop was, Mad Skillz and From Where??? stand out as being among the top tier of that year.
Mad Skillz - From Where???:
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