In 1984 Keith "Kool Keith" Thornton founded The Bronx hip-hop group Ultramagnetic MC's, composed by himself, Cedric "Ced Gee" Miller, Trevor "TR Love" Randolph and Maurice "DJ Moe Love" Smith. The four are part of some of the most important crews of break dancers in New York.
The group recorded the demo "Space Groove" in 1984 and sign with the independent label Diamond International, releasing the debut single "To Give Your Love" around 1985. In this period, they became popular at block parties, in 1986 they agree with Next Plateau Records and publish "Ego Trippin'": is the first hip-hop track to sample the drum from Melvin Bliss' "Synthetic Substitution", one of the most sampled songs of all time. The piece is revolutionary in the hip-hop genre for its minimal production style in which drum samples are combined with synthesizer riffs to act as a backdrop to the atypical rapping style of the performers, Ced Gee and Kool Keith.
During this period, Ced Gee becomes one of the most influential producers in the circuit and gives his own imprint to the art of sampling, being called to work on the debut album of Boogie Down Productions "Criminal Minded" and the debut of the duo Eric B. & Rakim "Paid in Full", both considered among the best albums in the history of the genre, furthermore his contribution will also influence The Bomb Squad for the set of the Public Enemy album "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back". The following year, the group release "Travelling at the Speed of Thought (Original)" and "Funky": the latter boasts a sample from Joe Cocker's "Woman to Woman", then used even for the seminal hit "California Love" by 2Pac & Dr. Dre.
The production of this project is flawless: Ced Gee is one of the first, if not the first, to use an SP-1200 sampler in order to build the rhythms for the album. The sound he produces derives from a different type of sampling compared to eighties records and makes excellent use of classic songs especially by James Brown, but also by George Clinton, Lonnie Smith, JBs, Lyn Collins, David Bowie, The Meters, Public Enemy, Bob James, Dennis Coffey, Jackie Robinson, Commodores, Jackson 5 and Rolling Stones.
On this remarkable soundscape invented by Ced Gee, Keith develops extravagant lyrics, meaningless, not too impressed, sometimes you can grasp the braggadocio inherent in the bars trapped by the rapper in unconventional rhyme schemes and delivered with a smoothness and fresh, impeccable flow and vibrant enough to bring these energetic funky beats to play on his side.
In terms of rapping, Keith is clearly superior offering a brilliant performance, but Ced Gee does his part by siding as the second rapper and playing his role of "shoulder" in the most functional way possible: he drops with a light-hearted delivery style, a series of simple lyrics which, if isolated from the rest, are inferior, which enhances Keith's qualities at the expense of his. Nonetheless, he owed him great props for the production provided here, he brings the album to the top ten of '88: the disc is a hidden masterpiece in the new school, underrated, but innovative, fresh and deeply coherent. Today it's rightly considered a classic hip-hop album by retrospective critics and clearly one of the finest projects of the eighties.
Highlights: "Ease Back", "Ego Trippin'", "Travelling at the Speed of Thought (Remix)", "Break North", "Critical Beatdown".
Rating: 8.5/10.
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