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| Image via Venomous2000 |
Heads mght stay throwing shade at Jersey, but when it comes to that true school hip-hop, we have it on lock. No one exudes that more, in my opinion, than
Venomous2000, who recently dropped his tenth solo album,
Sounds of the Great Ones, which is produced in its entirety by
Trilian, who is straight out of Serbia. That's the beauty of Venomous' style.
Seeing as I love everything about Jersey's hip-hop underground, I run into Venomous at least once a year, usually at the Jersey Fresh Jam in Trenton. I believe it was there one year where he told me he was either just coming back from or getting ready to go to Europe. He knew then, like
M.O.P. and
Onyx do now, that the style of hip-hop he was making (which is truer to the roots and mentality of the '90s era) got way more appreciation overseas than it does here.
It'd make sense that his 10th project would be helmed by a producer who lives in a region that shares the same mentality as this Passaic, NJ representer did.
Throughout
Sounds of the Great Ones, Venomous pays tribute to the lost arts of hip-hop. We're talking lyrical wizardy placed over invigorating boom bap hip-hop tracks. Comic book-loving hip-hop heads will love what Venomous did on "Marvelous (Planet-Ill)." Tracks like "Psalms 76" sound like those uplifting, intense tracks that soundtrack some of the illest graf pieces on city walls, while "Products of Environment" details the ills that go down on the streets in between those very walls. From the block to the beats to the brain, Venomous2000 and Trilian bridged the gap, for the culture.
Featured artists on
Sounds of the Great Ones include
The Artifacts,
Inspectah Deck,
Shabaam Sadeeq,
Cella Dwellas,
C-Rayz Walz,
Reks, and loads of cuts from
DJ TMB. You can cop
Sounds of the Great Ones digitally
via Bandcamp, or you can get this original rap music
on compact disc as well. Stream the full project down below.
