Music Review – Head-Roc: The Return of Black Broadway

11Mar08

Head-Roc
“The Return of Black Broadway” – 2003

DC hip-hop artists tend to have a false stigma attached to them as this city hasn’t really produced an MC with national recognition. Part of the problem with DC hip-hop is it doesn’t pretend to be anything else – most DC hip hoppers don’t aspire to sound like artists from New York, Los Angeles, or even the dirty south. We have our own sound; it’s a little slower with a swing best appreciated here in Chocolate City. Head-Roc’s album is a blueprint for that DC sound – most of the cuts on this record clock in under 93 BPM, and his samples and instrumental arrangements float above the in-the-pocket percussion. His rhymes touch on all aspects of life here in the Nation’s Capitol – from the day-to-day grind to the disenfranchisement of 600,000 citizens without a voice on Capitol Hill. It’s a classic album with a true underground sound.

Heady will be performing at the Hip Hop Congress show at the 9:30 Club on the 18th!

More inside

This is a review I wrote in 2004 for something that never got published. I have a bunch of them that I found on my USB hard drive. If anyone from work is reading this, I just want to note how I am leveraging existing content to minimize time spent blogging daily WHILE optimizing the search engine rankings of my man Head-Roc. (thats why I am the VP of Hip Hop, ask Frank – meanwhile they got me coloring in visio charts)

BTW – that album is out of print (vinyl is a collector’s edition) – but more about head-roc can be found here, and you can also buy his second album Negrophobia on cdbaby, and search for him on itunes cause he’s on that.

PEACE