by
Steinski
- Record Label: Illegal Art
- Release Date: May 27, 2008
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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Rap music has rarely gotten more virtuosic and creative than it does here.
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Alternative Press'The Motorcade Sped On,' a track that chops up funky beats with verteran newscaster Walter Cronkite reporting the death of President John F. Kennedy, is worth the price of admission alone. [July 2008, p.170]
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Not all connect, but a bonus disc, the soon-vanished 2002 full-length Nothing to Fear, compensates. Buy this before it vanishes, too.
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It's rare that historically important recordings are also essential listening, but this is such a case.
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Nothing to Fear might be the surprise highlight of this collection, even accounting for all the classic stuff on the first disc.
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Luckily for us, Illegal Art has included with this set 2006’s Nothing to Fear a riveting journey by DJ that shows Steinski to be entering his second golden age.
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Simply put, it is an essential document of hip hop history, an interesting collection of sound art, and a lot of fun to listen to as well.
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A reasonable first impulse is to try to identify all the sound sources; the inevitable second impulse is to marvel at how well he has chopped up and rearranged them into units of rhythm.
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The Steinski myth has grown in the darkness of bootlegs, but this long-overdue release proves that the reality more than lives up to the legend.
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Barring "Blade Runner," the best pop art by a former adman. [June 2008, p.119]
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The WireWhile Steinski's work with DeFranco aka Double Dee, is the most dazzling--precisely because it avoids the pitfalls of run of the mill culture jamming and guerrilla media tactics--Steinski's solo tracks certainly have their own pleasures, even if they are more straightforwardly textural than his collabotation with Double Dee. [June 2008, p.57]
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They may not seem on-point at first, occasionally wandering into vaguely tangential realms like a professor who’s a few dropped chalks away from the retirement home, but eventually the genius of it settles in.
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By listening to What Does It All Mean?, you're giving yourself a vital history lesson, a blast of fun, and above all, some 130 minutes of fantastic music.
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Buy it while you can.
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Influence aside, what's just as impressive about this handsome anthology of barely legal rarities is how well tracks work as songs.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 16
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Mixed: 2 out of 16
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Negative: 2 out of 16
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ntretyuif.Jan 9, 2009This will be in the hip hop hall of fame its classic sample based hip hop which birthed the golden age of hip hop.
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MikeJ.Oct 7, 2008
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MycroftW.Sep 20, 2008Worth your dollar for the Lessons alone. Grab it!