Yet another chapter in the hidden saga of British rap heads rocking with Long Island. Stateside, I grew up knowing The Prodigy for the "Breathe" video and the song "Smack My Bitch Up." And as Keith Flint featured most prominently in the "Breathe" video, I assumed for the longest that he was The Prodigy. It wasn't until much later that I realized they were a group, and only in the last few years did I somehow come to realize that their main songwriter was a guy named Liam Howlett who basically came of age on golden-era hip-hop and in 1999 he put out a DJ mix rife with it.
The Dirtchamber Sessions Volume One was the product of a DJ set Howlett did on BBC Radio 1 the year prior. Apparently, it was so well received he turned it into a commercial album release, with some minor adjustments. The big change everyone talks about is the removal of "Sgt. Pepper's," but for our purposes, Dirtchamber is noteworthy for the addition of JVC Force's "Strong Island" not so randomly placed in proximity to "Public Enemy #1." The whole mix is fantastic, and it's in "Section 6" that you'll hear both tracks amid all types of all shit. As a fun post-script to this whole thing,16 years later, The Prodigy blended Public Enemy classic "Shut Em Down" through Manfred Mann's "One Way Glass" for a track called "Shut Em Up," very much in the Dirtchamber vein.
Also in Great Neck, I Am Shee, as in Sheffer, as in the lost ululations of loft jazz singer and painter Amy Sheffer. Some of the best free jazz instrumentation figure skates invisible lines between symphony and cacophony, chords and discord, genius and insanity. When it comes to free jazz vocals, one often expects howls, scats, and throat singing. In Sheffer's capable voice box, such extended vocal techniques punctuate bouts of operatic virtuosity. She sang in the New York City jazz scene from the late 1960s through the 1980s, eventually returning to the house where her parents raised her in Great Neck. She recently told Tone Glow:
"There’s very little mind expansion in my life outside of my artwork and my music. I’m an 81-year-old woman with two roommates and I’m trying to get along with them. I don’t wanna bother people the way I might have bothered people when I was younger. I’ve got body dysmorphia, I’ve got insomnia, so mostly I’m just trying to keep myself together, do some shopping, take care of the house ... But it’s not like I’m in the psychic realm I used to be in. You know? I mean, it was like I would go around talking to people who weren’t there and all that kind of stuff. I’d have strange visitations. It was weird. Back in the day I went to a therapist and they showed me what the therapist had written about me: he had said 'possibly psychotic.' I felt very involved with the cosmos back then. Where I’m living now in Great Neck, it’s not very far-out."
Whether Sheffer has heard the latest from fellow Great Necker AWOL Da Mindwriter, I cannot say. I will say that Sheffer's equally vibrant work and personality should serve to remind readers and listeners that we never know what untold depths of experience and perception inform the 81-year-old women we may randomly run into at the grocery store. All the more reason to question one's elders and kindly offer to carry their bags for them.
Story time: Back when your faithful narrator lived in the very humble Stewart Manor abode pictured in the Me, Myself & I section of this site, one of the neighbors with whom we shared our eastern wall was a complete fucking basket case—what my brother and his colleagues at the airport would call an EDP, that is, an emotionally disturbed person. I'm not worried about being insensitive here, because although he may indeed have had bipolar disorder as the landlord claimed to have heard, he was also a racist lunatic who would scream all sorts of horrible shit at his girlfriend, who was Latina. I hope she got out of there. If she'd killed him, I wouldn't have told. As it happened, he also played videogames at extreme volumes and screamed insane racist shit at people while doing that, too.
Thought experiment: Listen to every bar on Now Loading as if AWOL Da Mindwriter is screaming it at someone he's playing against in a videogame. (Maybe August Fanon?) You'll find there are actual inflection points—moments where the music aligns exactly with such a device, as if Pink Floyd really did record certain parts of Dark Side of the Moon over The Wizard of Oz. The lunatic on the grass would be the skit at the end of "Hands on Me," down you'll go "Swatting." If AWOL was simply the videogame name check version of The Game's rap game name check, there wouldn't be as much to say. Instead, he's more the augmented reality hologram projecting 64 bit graphically rendered matrices of a day in the life (of August Fanon), Channel Zero dream casting Channel 37. Log on.
After serving 16 years for murder conspiracy and robbery, Phiik returned home to find his longtime partner in rhyme Lungs ready to share the spoils of his decade-plus multi-diamond remix run, and the reunited duo dropped the song of the summer, and then they did it again. Kid Art did all the videos, which look so clean they feel like AI even though they aren't—a compliment akin to calling a real freestyle written. Yo, the girl in the jersey blowing bubblegum?! Freak. Hoes. All I know. Oh wait. That's not what's happening at all here, is it? Steel Tipped Dove didn't flip Billy Idol. Lungs does look like a young Paul Simon. Lungs looks like Willem Dafoe. Phiik raps like a gatling laser.
I've been summering in the Hamptons. Nah, I'm playing. I just haven't felt like writing anything here for a few months. But now, as with this site's legendarily inspired origin spell, mad Long Island rappers have dropped dope records in sequence. So, like Jesus getting out of jail, I'm back in an American adaptation of the French New Wave.
Speaking of Jesus, one of the pieces I've been meaning to cover for the longest is this, the "final secular album" from Josh Alias. I'm not going to lie. The first time I listened to it, I wasn't crazy about it. I liked it, but it also made me want to wind back the 30-something-song biblical flood of a mixtape he dropped prior to his last album. Instead, I took a few days and relistened.
I have an uncomplicated relationship with religion, which is to say I've never practiced one in my life, and I currently believe God is most likely the cat my wife and I saw on the Bay Parkway while driving home this evening. I also have a cherished handful of friends and relatives who worship Jesus Christ, and that's cool. One might even say Jesus was the OG JuCommie.
So, anyway, on the holy-trinity third listen, Atlasclicked, and the world perpetually on his shoulders fell into place like a Sisyphean boulder, and now I really like it. Will it take you, phantom-reader rap fan, three listens to enjoy this album, or fewer, or more? Does that have anything to do with your appetite for religion, spirituality, and Gomer Oz Dabar? There's only one ... way to find out.
Love Island: Beyond the Villa is when they put the cast in clothes, place them in various metropolitan areas, and have them act like middle schoolers. But wait, there's more. The people you most enjoyed seeing half-naked elected not to participate. There's also some weird meta-narrative about post-island opportunities, which I assume means paid influencer spots but also mostly porn. It shouldn't be lost on anyone that even characters in Eureka (what I call Euphoria because words matter) laze around watching this shit. Imagine being a fly on the wall for those licensing negotiations.
I say all this to say I hope one day there's a Baibeebean album.
Gmail is my preferred social media platform, iPhone app, and personal organizer. Gmail is technically not any of those things, but, like all criticism ever written, that sentence was really about its writer. Gmail is also my digital hoard. At any given moment, I'm liable to have more than 150 emails marked unread. Some of my primary Gmail (I have like five) account's greatest hits include a Strand Bookstore gift certificate from 2015 with no more than $10 left on it and an abandoned business proposal for a pre-Long Island Rap Records record label from 2016. If Fony Wallace's Mr. In Ya Gmail, I'm Mr. In My Gmail.
Darc Mind is my favorite MC-DJ duo. There is nothing else in hip-hop quite like the combination of Web D's beats and Kevroc's rhymes. How curious then that one of their best known songs, indeed their only single ever pressed, wasn't produced by Web D, but by New Jersey's Nick Wiz. When I spoke with the duo about this record, Web said, "Originally on Loud, we had a single deal. They was afraid of us. They didn’t know what to do with us ... They did think our sound was a little rough around the edges, so they sent us to Nick Wiz, and we did the single for them, which was 'Outside Looking In.' They put it out there for radio release. It was almost like a promo. They never released it in the stores or nothing like that. It was mad copies pressed up and they promo’ed the shit out of it."
As so many copies were pressed, the single isn't too hard to find, and in addition to radio and album versions of the song, it contains the instrumental and acapella tracks. Any Kevroc acapella is a thing to behold. Recently, however, it was revealed that these aren't the only versions. In 2025, Nick Wiz included an alternate mix of "Outside Looking In" on his Cellar Selections Volume 11compilation. When I first heard this, I immediately lost my shit, getting so excited I somehow convinced myself there were actually different lyrics on this version. There aren't, but it's still very dope. Anyway, I'd resolved to do a post about it sometime, and when that time came a few days ago, I went looking for the song again only to find that it's actually not the only Nick Wiz-produced Darc Mind track available.
In fact, the very first installment of Wiz's Cellar Sounds compilation series, released back in 2008, includes an otherwise unreleased Darc Mind song called "We In This." Additionally, Cellar Sounds Volume 5, released in 2017, has another unreleased track called "Femme Fatale," and Cellar Extras Part 3,from 2019, has an alternate take of that song. While there isn't any information available on these recordings beyond the compilations' limited credits, all of them are dated to 1996, the same year that "Outside Looking In" dropped. So, while Nick Wiz did not immediately respond to a request for comment, we can likely infer that the songs were recorded in or around the same time as one another, perhaps during the same session(s). Could it be that all of these songs were tracked as potential singles, and that a version of "Outside Looking In" was eventually chosen for release?
If this was the case, I think everyone can agree that out of the three songs, the choice most faithfully represents what we've come to appreciate as the Darc Mind sound. It might not be the darkest of the bunch, but it is the most Darc. As for the others, "We In This" seems to recall the '80s basement parties Kev rocked in his youth, with one of its verses later appearing on "U Da One" off Symptomatic of a Greater Ill, while "Femme Fatale" appears to be a noirish take on "Fine Brown Frame" from Bipolar, with an extra verse and alternate hook. What did Nick Wiz's producorial role entail? How did it align with Web and Kev's vision? We may never know. Regardless, Darc Mind was here.
I don't remember Lynbrook. From ages 1 to 5, my family lived in Valley Steam in an apartment on Merrick Road above a store that sold bowling supplies. Mom averaged over 200 for a while. The metal detectors at Green Acres Cinemas were added after somebody shot up the screen during The Godfather Part III. Still haven't seen it, but I've been meaning to check the director's cut. It couldn't have been that bad. I do still have the Los Angeles Raiders Starter cap. I see Wooden Shoe Nursery School is still open as is Brooklyn Avenue School, where I went to kindergarten.
There's now a fucking warehouse of a record store in Valley Stream called All About Records. Trust me, they're open. It has two doors. There's a $5 room, which is so dusty you might want to wear a mask if you'll be a while. For that matter, don't talk politics with the staff.
Why shouldn't humanity get transcended? To think this is the be-all and end-all platonic ideal of intelligent life is a prime example of how not that it is. Not intelligent, not ideal, not the be-all end-all: take your pick. That being typed, we flesh bags have much organic evolving to do before we make it to "San Junipero," and I don't mean figuring out how to live to 150 so we can buy more things for longer; I mean getting more empathetic. After all, empathy is an evolved trait. Now, when it comes to seizing the means of production from the current batch of tech-bro-crat tycoons and trying their worst for crimes against humanity, that's another story. Our future cybernetic counterparts would agree.
