Various Artists - Going Uptown: A New Jack Swing Era Mix (Mixed By DJ Shortkut)

We’re slow-jammin’

What with hip-hop’s accepted golden age being dredged up time and again lately, it’s refreshing to see something take a different approach. In Going Uptown, two-time West Coast DMC and one-time Zulu Nation International Champion DJ Shortkut takes a host of New Jack Swing tracks and welds them together in familiar mix-tape style. What sets it apart from other mixes is that this isn’t wry 80s/comedy/poor man’s DJ Yoda-style mixing, head-pounding crunk collages, or now-run-of-the mill hip-hop history cut-and-pastes. New Jack Swing itself has aged surprisingly well, even if Going Uptown doesn’t utilise Blackstreet’s I Like The Way You Work (kind of like psych without Piper At The Gates Of Dawn). Still, Teddy Riley’s other mega-group, Guy, pitch in twice, once segueing with Bobby Brown’s My Prerogative, which is still a barnstormer. Elsewhere, there’s Around The Way Girl, one of the tracks that shifted LL Cool J from hard-edged knock-out to (later clichéd) ladies’ love man. It’s still a mix tape, so your enjoyment will depend on how interested you are in said style presented this way. Still, nowadays Radio One is a daily purveyor of watered-down versions of everything on this disc, so why not return to the source?

Antidote | ANT 119

Reviewed by Jason Draper
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