Get On Down / Giant (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.
For me, 1992 is the miracle year of hip hop. While it's not the year that most of my favorite records came out, I think it's the best and most consistent year of hip hop before the golden era started showing signs of cracking. It built off of 1991 and took things, particularly from a production standpoint, to higher levels. Innovation was careening forward weekly with new releases that explored new ground in a genre that was making sure the world knew was here to stay.
Return of the Funky Man is Lord Finesse's 2nd full length, though he's lost DJ Mike Smooth since his 1990 release. Also by this time the Diggin' In The Crates crew (or DITC, for short) saw their notoriety rising as Diamond D and Showbiz & AG were making noise. Despite all of that, Lord Finesse flew under my radar when I was buying records in 1992. I don't remember seeing Finesse on Yo! and I guess what The Source had written about him wasn't enough to make me hunt down anything by him at the time. Part of that is tragic, because this is exactly the sort of thing I was listening to at the time and I should have had decades to grow with this record. But on the plus side, I was able to discover a true classic many years later and hear the exact kind of hip hop production I love in the mid 2010s.
And it is the production that really makes this record soar for me. There's enough of that late 80s and early 90s fast tempo drums, with those eclectic samples and bass lines that were starting to assert themselves by this point. There isn't a stinker in the bunch as every song is funkier than the one before. On the mic, Finesse has a voice that did take me a little time to get used to. It's a little higher pitched and nasally, but not in an over the top B-Real sort of way. Just in a way that didn't grab me immediately and required a few listens to have his lyrics sink in. Once they did sink in, it became easy to see why he's so respected all these years later.
While I cannot say that this splatter colored vinyl is aesthetically the most pleasing record I have ever seen, I am gratefully to have a nice double LP reissue of this as even the 2005 and 2014 reissues had become quite scarce over the years, If he originally flew under your radar like he did mine, it's probably time to give Lord Finesse a listen, and this is a great place to start.
Lord Finesse - Return of the Funky Man:
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