Back 2 Da Source (2025, Reissue)
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.
Other than the Hieroglyphics crew, there wasn't a lot of hip hop that I was paying attention to after 1994. I had mostly moved on to punk and indie rock and when I would occasionally dip my toe back in to see what was happening, inevitably I would be disappointed. But in the year 2000, two albums came out that made me reevaluate my relationship with rap. The first of these records was Jurassic 5's Quality Control. And the second was Journey to Anywhere by Ugly Duckling. Both of these albums alerted me that there were still people doing interesting things in hip hop.
Ugly Duckling seemed the more unabashed of the two when it came to harkening back to the style of hip hop I liked best. Their production could have slid right in to 1993 and you'd hardly notice. The rapping also connected with me, mixing the Das EFX pop culture references (but no diggitys) with the non sequitur these-words-just-sound-nice-together feeling of early Beck. Name drop The Great Space Coaster and I'm paying attention. What I didn't know at the time was that Ugly Duckling had been around for a while and had even self released an album on cassette back in 1995. 30 years later, Back 2 Da Source stepped up to the plate and reissued that long lost album on vinyl for the first time.
It's every bit as good as Journey to Anywhere. Quite literally in some cases as six of the songs from that album also appear on Down The Road in some capacity. For some, like "Pick Up Lines" and "Journey to Anywhere," are quite similar; demos of what was to come. But for others, "If You Want To Know" and "Down The Road" being big examples, the production is wildly different making them feel like completely unique songs. And sure, six songs repeating sounds like a lot, but there are ten other songs on here that aren't on Journey to Anywhere, and that's not even including the skits.
It's an incredible collection of songs and is just the sort of thing I really needed to hear in 1995, but never did. This is the sort of hip hop I love, particularly in the way the beats are structured. I feel like this kind of production is a completely lost art. I'll never understand why no one can make records that sound like this anymore, but at least there is a seemingly unneeded number of 30+ year old records that I can go back to and cherish.
Ugly Duckling – Down The Road:
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