Only one question matters: if you’re a fan of Da Beatminerz legacy, will this new compilation album disappoint you? The answer is “Fuck no.” Go cop it & enjoy it all summer long.
That said, there is much to unpack here. Mr. Walt and Evil Dee have laced up everyone from Ultramagnetic to Black Star, a continuous string of classics that’s over twenty years deep now. Despite all that history, it seemed like too much of The Discourse™ around this album was about the marketing more than the music itself.
The narrative is that it wasn’t promoted enough, but the truth is far worse: it has been getting promotion since last November, when The Source dot com dropped the first single, “Seckle,” with KRS-One. When the bomb finally dropped on June 21st, it got written up on a couple dozen major sites. This was a classic, old school rollout.
Despite all that, few of their fans knew this LP was coming. Many of them still have no idea it exists. The media ecosystem for rap music is badly broken in 2024, which is a key reason you’re reading this now.
The next decade will be kind to the hard-headed. As Ras Kass puts it on track four, “never say that skills played out, cuz everything comes back in style.” His track here is magnificent and he sounds like he’s having more fun than ever rapping, too. Most of the best performances on Stifled Creativity come from unrepentant outcasts like him: Stahhr, Apathy, Rustee Jux and Mickey Factz all deliver the goods in style.
Dinosaur throwbacks are already living in the future, and all the grumpy true school old heads who avoided Sean Combs & Drake like the plague are looking pretty damn smart in 2024. You many never see much money from a lifetime spent refusing to sell out, but you will be vindicated by history, every time.
In 1999, as I was tearing the plastic off Black Moon’s War Zone, my friends were filling me in on the lore: the long lawsuit with Nervous Records, the extended family of Boot Camp Clik, the legend of Drew Friedman. Within two minutes, I was about to be baffled & fascinated by my introduction to that Duck Down sound. Within two years, Da Beatminerz would watch Rawkus Records implode from the inside. Technology and fads change fast, but still, it amazing how little changed since then.
The formula certainly didn’t have to change much. This tape is beautifully 90’s: it’s over twenty tracks deep, there is a stupid skit running throughout the album, there’s bare-bones R&B tracks over straight-up boom bap, there are multiple remixes included, and it sounds like it’s fresh off a fucking ADAT, all shiny highs and booming lows.
What sticks out to me on repeated listens, though, is how much these two brothers let the formula breathe. This isn’t fan service paint by numbers retread bullshit, this isn’t breakdancing in an art museum while spectators sip wine and applaud. They’re still tapped in with the raw mash-up meat grinder that is hip hop culture, digging daily, flipping forever. They are extremely fucking good at this.
I am impressed & inspired. Like that last Ghostface LP, Stifled Creativity is hardly a perfect album, but it is a perfect specimen, an exemplar of what makes NYC rap music so uniquely great. All they had to do was show up and prove they’ve still got it, and instead they went absurdly hard and brought us this excessive, ambitious gem. Five Dickies.
