Hero Theme Song #1
Boogie Down Productions – Jack Of Spades / I'm Still #1Jive – 1169-1-JDVinyl, 12", US, 1988
About a week ago, S sends a text to me and R saying "I know y'all are watching this brilliance!"
Um... I had forgotten. A few seconds of panic followed as I tried to piece together what I had dropped the ball on. Another text or two and I realized it wasn't a union press conference or something that I was missing, but something far more important and profound: the KRS-One/Big Daddy Kane "Verzuz" battle! My son had it up on his iPad a minute later and we got to catch an hour that gave me more joy than anything I've seen on TV in years.
Plenty of other places to see what you missed, hear some highlights from the battle or read some color commentary. Of course I think KRS won, but I'm biased. My Boogie Down Productions cassette tapes were life changing. KRS-One got called "the Teacha," but it wasn't just that his rhymes and commentary opened doors in my head about race, politics, and culture back then. The music was just as key: I learned James Brown 45s from studying BDP breakbeats, chased down dancehall singles because Kris had reused their chorus or riddim, and BDP gave me absolute proof that "being conscious" did NOT mean you get a pass on needing to make heads nod or being able to move the dancefloor.
(And just to be fair- Big Daddy Kane doesn't always get the same "deep thinker" rep as KRS, but that sells him short in the other direction. Kane's verse in Burn Hollywood Burn blew my mind back in the day and is a reason that it's still one of my favorite PE tracks.)
The fun I had watching that battle led me to digging out a big stack of records. It's confirmed, I still love this stuff. Boogie Down Productions and KRS-One have been in rotation for the last week, but also made me remember how much I enjoyed the productions he did for the rest of the BDP crew and beyond... D-Nice, Mad Lion, Ms. Melodie, Just-Ice, Sly and Robbie, Shabba Ranks! Below is a quick rip of one of my favorite BDP 12s from that pile. The record wasn't in perfect shape, but honestly it wasn't easy to tell when a pop was from my vinyl or just part of the loop they had sampled. It came out sounding OK to me and I've been enjoying the hell out of it.
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The A side must be the best comedy action hero theme song ever cut on wax. Axel F officially has nothing on Jack Of Spades. (Are there other songs in competition for that title?) I really hadn't thought about this track having come from the soundtrack to I'm Gonna Git You Sucka in years. Remembering that when I put this on the other day left me smiling all week whenever I thought about BDP performing in the last scene of the movie. D-Nice scratches the chorus over a KRS-One produced beat that makes great use of a sample from a Studio One instrumental called Greedy G (itself a Jamaican twist on James Brown's Get On The Good Foot).
The B side is my favorite though, a long mix of the Boogie Down Productions classic, I'm Still #1. Easily one of their best songs, you get five and a half minutes of Kris talking smack, teaching and giving marching orders to the industry over a slow as hell beat. So many hip hop "rules" weren't written yet in 1989. I think you can hear in this song just how new and exciting it could all feel. The Numero Uno Rerecording picks up the pace, throws in few more breaks and entirely new lyrics. If there are any old school BDP fans out there who don't already know this cut, you are in for a treat! This guy... A non-album track buried on the B side of movie soundtrack single and KRS still packs it with more quality rhymes than half the rappers out there can manage for a whole album.
At the end of the first side, between the two main attractions, they strangely squeeze in one more: Necessary, pulled from the By All Means Necessary LP. Not really a song, it features KRS in his full Poet/Teacher mode, getting deep with just some dramatic 80s synthesizer effects to back him. Maybe it isn't the Blastmaster at his most exciting, but you've got to love them for throwing over half an hour of music onto a single. Given the recent Verzuz battle, it's worth noting that way back in '89, Juice Crew connections didn't keep KRS from mentioning Kane in his list of friends:
I got some friends, I got some allies like Stet and Big Daddy Kane
They know by all means necessary that Peace is the name of this game
Whether peace by war, or peace by peace, the reality of peace is scary
But we must get there, one way or another, by all means necessary
And in a week where this record brought me a lot of needed joy (and a little refugee from what's felt like endless news of people dealing with loss, illness, or violence), lyrics that I might usually hear as corny became easy to appreciate. Thank you to S for that text and I hope some of you enjoy this one as much as I have.
Tracklist
A1 Jack Of Spades (BDP Movie Mix) 4:49
A2 Jack Of Spades (Extended Remix) 5:45
A3 Jack Of Spades (Instrumental) 4:13
A4 Necessary 2:57
B1 I'm Still #1 (Extended Remix) 5:25
B2 I'm Still #1 (Single Edit) 4:50
B3 I'm Still #1 (Numero Uno Re-Recording) 5:23
Fresh... for FLAC of Spades, you suckas! (Download zip file w 24-96 FLAC): https://mega.nz/file/JTpW3agY#47jzDCDH99GB99SjDfIAyOA7e_M_cRetA1_AcQaGKSE
No beatin' around the bush, straight up, just like the MP3 (stream or download): https://mega.nz/folder/sewUkSwB#qdbmEJ42ULGbNikNPdWDuw
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