Fat Beats (2008)
I write a lot about hip hop albums that I discovered as I generically just look for things I never heard back in the early 90s. This album is not that. I very specifically went looking to see if Freddie Foxxx had released anything in the golden era. I first heard of Freddie when he guested on Boogie Down Productions' "Ruff Ruff" in 1992. He popped up a few other times during that era but I wasn't aware of him having released an album. So I went looking and found an album from 1989 and then I found this.
Released in 2008 under the name Bumpy Knuckles (I guess he changed his name at some point?) this double CD includes two different versions of what was supposed to be Freddy Foxxx's sophomore album. The first of them (chronologically) is a 1993 version of the album produced by DITC, the Diggin' In The Crates crew. Freddie's gruff, bombastic delivery works surprisingly well over the smoother beats provided by the likes of Showbiz, Lord Finesse and Buckwild. It's a pairing that may not seem obvious when you first hear of it, but when you actually listen to it, it makes all of the sense in the world.
The story goes is that this version was rejected by The Flavor Unit (where he had signed at the time) and they made Freddie start over. This second version is referred to as the 'Jailhouse' version, and only uses five songs from the DITC version, with all but one of them completely reworked from a beats standpoint. While I do prefer the beats on the DITC version, the 1994 attempt at this album is absolutely no slouch. Yeah, there's one or two songs with a hook or some part that seems every so slightly aimed at a commercial crossover, but Freddie keeps things rough. The beats are representative of the good parts of 1994's hip hop sound and haven't been overtaken with any G funk nonsense. It's the version I like ever so slightly less, though it does sound bigger and more polished.
Honestly, it's like having two totally separate records. I can very easily imagine them as individual records released back to back over 2 years. Unfortunately for Freddie Foxxx, neither was ever released. After making him redo the album entirely, The Flavor Unit shelved the second swing at it as well. It wasn't until 2008 when they would see the light of day thanks to Fat Beats. I'm happy to have been able to hunt down this CD as a reasonable price, as they tend to get a bit expensive these days, but boy oh boy would I love vinyl versions of both of these albums. Someone needs to get on that!
Bumpy Knuckles (Freddie Foxxx) - Crazy Like A Foxxx (DITC Version):
Bumpy Knuckles (Freddie Foxxx) - Crazy Like A Foxxx (Jailhouse Version):
No comments:
Post a Comment