I've said this before on several occasions, but it would be hard for me to overstate just how much I love the Pete Rock remix of Jamal's Fades 'Em All. Built around a brief sample from The Soft Machine's Slightly All The Time, it's quite possibly my favorite hip hop beat of all time and the instrumental cassingle was on an almost continuous loop in my walkman throughout '96. I was convinced that once Jamal, aka Mally G, left the kiddie rap group Illegal and hooked up with Def Squad that he was going to blow up. He never quite managed to live up to his potential, but that one single was better than the entire catalogs of rappers who were a lot more succesful than him.
After jumping around from Philly to Newark to Atlanta over the past decade, Jamal's put in a few guest appearances here and there, including on former Illegal member Malik's album Hershey Locc Hefner, and even produced a track on Beanie Sigel's B. Coming album, Once Again It's On. There was some talk a few years ago that Jamal had signed on to Yukmouth's label Smoke-A-Lot Records, but it's been almost three years and still no album from him since that news broke so I'll have to assume the deal's fallen through. The fact that he's revisiting Fades 'Em All on a home video freestyle and shouting out his myspace page would seem to confirm that. Dude can still rap, though, and I can't front; if Jamal dropped an album today, I'd be one of the first to cop it.
While we're on the subject, here's the original version of Fades 'Em All produced by Redman:
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