I’m not entirely sure why, but I’ve recently had the pleasure of rediscovering a shitload of True School rap songs that dominated my teenage years over the past couple weeks. Every Tuesday, I’m going to try and share some of my favorites from the era. Most of these songs will be pretty obvious to anyone that grew up around this time, but as the world becomes increasingly digitized, it’s easy to lose track of stuff. Hopefully this will help remedy that loss.

And starting TRUE SCHOOL TUESDAYS off proper, I chose to hit y’all off with what is strangely one of my favorite beats of all time: Buckwild’s “Masta IC” for Mic Geronimo. Geronimo is a capable MC that had a couple solid albums, but he’s not really anything spectacular on the ‘phone. Just a solid rapper who doesn’t ruin beats. But there’s just something about this beat that I’ve always found really powerful even though it’s melodically fairly understated–just a rolling xylophone line and some heavy sub bass with a boombap breakbeat as the backbone. Buckwild has always been more than competent at constructing really full sounding production with a simple sample, filtered bassline, and a break.

More stuff to come.

Mic Geronimo “Masta IC” (256, Zshare)

-e