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Back during my college days in the late 90's, when I was living up in Boston, the only hip hop station available was "Jam'n 94.5," a station that spent more time playing R&B slow jams and throwbacks from the Almighty R.S.O. (Benzino's posse of weed carriers / d-list rappers / broke thugs) than actual rap. In order to get my fix of real hip hop, I would spend hours recording Funkmaster Flex's show on Hot 97 whenever I came back to Jersey on vacation. As a result, I have dozens of Maxells sitting in a crate at home with recordings of his various sets from about '96 to '99.
During my era of radio recording, sometime around the summer of 1997, Fatman Scoop and the Crooklyn Clan began getting a significant amount of play on the radio; they were already well established on the club scene in NY, but it wasn't until Flex started spinning their records on air that they received any real attention from the mainstream. For those of you who aren't familiar with them, they would take break records and various instrumentals, loop a few vocal samples and record Scoop doing his hypeman routine on top of it. Perhaps the most famous of their songs was Be Faithful, which stayed in rotation on New York radio for several years after its release. Looking back on it, it could probably be considered an early prototype of what Baltimore Club music would evolve into some ten years later.
In any event, Flex was a big fan of Crooklyn Clan, and would play their records at least once a night. He eventually started putting together short sets of his own, modeled in large part after what the Clan and Scoop were doing. While going through my old cassettes the other day, I came across one of my favorite Flex shows of the time that featured one of those sets. I unfortunately didn't label it, but I believe it was from the early fall of 1997. He opened up with the following mix, featuring Lauryn Hill's vocals from Killing Me Softly, cut up with several other beats. The audio quality is a little rough, so bare with me:
Funkmaster Flex - Fall 1997 Show Intro
The highlight of the show, however, came right after the intro, when Flex unveiled a mix that he had been working on for months. Leading up to this particular night, Flex had been playing short 10 second snippets of it, as he developed the routine further each night. Taking the beat from Slick Rick's Mona Lisa, he cut up a bunch of T.V. soundtracks from the 50's and 60's; from Howdy Doody to The Flintstones to Gilligan's Island, virtually every show that's ever made it onto TBS's daytime schedule got at least a few seconds in the mix. For about the next two months, Flex played this set every night, adding in dozens of his signature bomb drop sound effects. The mix is dope, but it always amused me to imagine the general audience for Hot 97 nodding their heads along to something as corny as I Dream of Jeannie. Check it out:
Funkmaster Flex - T.V. Soundtrack Mix
7/7/2007 08:10:01 PM posted by Fresh