Ultramagnetic MCs

Boombox on the shoulder, blasting through the blocks of the Bronx, between metropolitan posses, unorthodox rhymes, samples you'd never expect and James Brown dance steps dusted off ad hoc, just to remind everyone who's really in charge.

It's 1984. Keith Matthew Thornton, aka Kool Keith, lives day by day, between a record to wear out and a rhyme to stitch together. A Master of Ceremonies who wants to break through and bring his own creature into the world, just like so many others. To do so, he calls in MC and producer Cedric Miller, aka Ced Gee, and DJs Trevor Randolph and Maurice Smith, better known respectively as TR Love and Moe Love. Thus is born a quartet of irreverent young upstarts ready to lay siege to anything within reach with odd time signatures, outlandish breaks, verbal broadsides and a showman's verve honed on the "stage" of the street, magnet in hand. It's precisely an (ultra) vibrant magnetism that sets them apart from the pack, as suggested by the name they chose: Ultramagnetic MC's. An uncompromising moniker, to be sure, one that says a lot about the early ambitions of four kids chasing the fame so coveted in the swaggering Reagan-era climate of those years, pursued by hordes of rappers and disc jockeys, adoptive sons of the five furies of his majesty Joseph Saddler.

The New York band's outsized ego stumbles in 1986 onto the US charts, with a single titled, of all things, "Ego Trippin"; a track included two years later on their debut album, "Critical Beatdown". An absolutely illuminating, brash entry onto the scene, notably removed from the rest of the east coast crew, and one that also contains the first-ever sample of one of the most pillaged tracks of the last six decades: "Synthetic Substitution" by bluesman Melvin Bliss. Foresight? Not only that.

Well, among the acts who managed to steer their own course in the final phase of the so-called old school, Ultramagnetic MC's hold a special place. Funky beats shot straight to the Moon, oddball rhymes on often absurd subjects, a flow with no fixed coordinates and scratches off the beat between sumptuous surges and sudden brakes: the hip-hop of the crew led by Thornton – before he embarked on a successful and much-loved solo career – is alien enough to climb Olympus's stairs with ease and, in particular, to serve as a beacon in the mutation of a genre no longer merely underground, but ever closer to the upper echelons of business that "count" in the beloved West.

The album is produced entirely using the legendary E-mu SP-1200, a sampler released onto the market just a few months earlier by E-mu Systems. A gem that Ced Gee wields to perfection. Here we find, indeed, surgically inserted samples that include, among others, David Bowie, The Meters, Bob James, Mongo Santamaria, Dennis Coffey, The Winstons, Lyn Collins, Motorhead (!), Juice and the voice of NASA mission control from a 1981 launch. James Brown, naturally, is in a class of his own, sampled repeatedly by the group, confirming an uncompromising, shared idolatry.

Well, I’m the ultimate—the rhyme imperial

I'm better, but some don't believe me though

But I'm a pro in hot material

On your Walkman, box or any stereo

Uno, dos not cuatro

Spanish girls, they like to call me Pancho

On the mic, innovating this pat-ter-en

You fell off, your brain is on Sa-tur-en

Take steps, and climb my ladder-and

Climb… climb, climb

Pace the rhythm, and clock the time

The opening lines strung together by Kool Keith on the lead-off track "Watch Me Now" are enough on their own to grasp the unusual flow of Ultramagnetic MC's right from the start. Plots lifted from "Star Trek", talk borrowed from the neighborhood playgrounds, in between pickup games, but above all deliberately garish detours away from the rebellious black-panther themes typical of the average ghetto rapper.

In short, Ultramagnetic MC's are goofballs, and they know it perfectly well. Their mood, after all, is a different one.

Mixed at Studio 1212 in the heart of Queens, after the group spent their first months working together testing out a Roland TR-707 drum machine and a 12-track Akai recorder, "Critical Beatdown" is a relentless hailstorm of freestyle rhymes and rambling of the highest order. Far from anarchic rap, though, make no mistake. The New York crew belongs only to itself. It observes its surroundings, assembles scraps fished from the bins of the street, and has no interest in being part of any circumstantial creed. Kool Keith and Ced Gee alternate between nonsense and sharp personal asides. There are also plenty of flashes of brilliance from TR Love and Moe Love. Both pull off turntable moves that follow oddball directions, as happens on "Ease Back", or in the mixing battle that closes out "Moe Luv's Theme" — the latter track famous for its opening sample of Jackie Robinson's "Pussyfooter". Scattered, disjointed thoughts find their outlet on "Kool Keith Housing Things", with moments set to exotic rhythms that glide by.

Well I'm sonically, high bionically

For you dummies, ironically stupid

What are you, Cupid?You steal my rhymes, and then you loop it

Wrong! Back this way

Follow me now, head this way

Into this, while I rap on through this

For many germs, who never knew this

Switches, upside down

It's the prelude to the filtered sax of "Feelin' it", another crazy marble drawn from a one-of-a-kind abacus, which sets up the sly, yet no less thrilling, groove of "One Minute Less". Ced Gee sows idiosyncrasy for the masses, amid repellent plastic gardens and metaphysical rays to dodge, while the two DJs mimic a shrill little trumpet. Also memorable are "Give The Drummer Some", known to most for the Prodigy sample in "Smack My Bitch Up", and the title track, itself sampled by the English duo five years later on "Out Of Space". These are tributes that arrived from across the Atlantic, testifying to the specific weight of a group that is, all things considered, one of a kind, notwithstanding a natural stylistic adherence to "classic" hip-hop canons.

The disjointed swagger of "Break North" lays bare, for the twelfth time, the true nature of the band, lost as it is in its own extraterrestrial, unreachable flow, ahead of the intoxicating (?) final flourish: "Ced-Gee (Delta Force One)", or how to teach future generations the possible fusion of smooth soul and hip-hop.

In the decades that followed there would be hiatuses, unruliness, solo ventures and convenience reunions. Aside from the thoroughly successful "The Four Horsemen" from 1993, the artistic scope of "Critical Beatdown" would continue to radiate a light all its own. An album recognizable among thousands (alongside equally essential records like "It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back" by Public Enemy, "Paid In Full" by the duo Eric B. & Rakim, and "Strictly Business" by EPMD), in its own way unaware of its role as a watershed moment in a memorable chapter of hip-hop history and of that charming little offshoot called boom bap.

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02/08/2020