It was a single mp3 in a folder of old rap tunes I’d gotten from somewhere. I was scanning through, looking for good tracks to DJ with, listening to snippets, hoping for a single beat or a bassline to grab me out of this sea of names and titles and times and numbers on my screen.
And three seconds was all it took. Just like that, I’m blindsided by a tune that caught me and didn’t let go: “Ya Don’t Stop”, by an act whose name I vaguely recalled seeing in a book or on a compilation or something somewhere: Freshco & DJ Miz. A bassline, a little brush of drums and cymbal as an intro, the beat drops, a vocal rides in over the track spitting a ridiculously catchy rhyme. A shouting refrain. An absurdly funky groove, a little cutting and scratching, these few elements juggled around for four minutes, one big breakdown with a minute to go, sounds dropping in and out while the MC swings over the beat with impeccable rhythm and timing. Seriously, it’s just about as good as it gets for middle-school hip-hop.
So who are these guys? Was this track just a case of lightning striking, or was there more of this out there to discover? I started doing a little research. As it turned out, I had one of their tracks (“Ain’t U Freshco?”) on an old Tommy Boy compilation CD, and it was also pretty damn great. So, thus intrigued, I went in search of the story behind these tunes. A short summary follows:
Shawn “Freshco” Conrad signed to Tommy Boy records in 1988, released a 12″ single, won the New Music Seminar rap Battle For World Supremacy in 1989, teamed with Philadelphia’s DJ Miz to release another 12″ in 1990 to great acclaim; work began on a full-length album, and they seemed set for fame and fortune. And then, in finest rap tradition, a series of delays and setbacks and budget concerns kept the LP from being put on the schedule. Tommy Boy released them from their contract in 1991, by which time their momentum in the public eye had effectively evaporated. A series of other projects followed, alone and together, but aside from Freshco appearing on an Original Flavor track in 1993 and self-releasing a 12″ in 1995, no further music surfaced until 2008… When an album’s worth of tracks surfaced for sale as a CDR on ebay, or available for mp3 download on Amazon.
And that’s where “Ya Don’t Stop” originated, a track on a compilation of demos and unreleased gems that, had all gone according to plan, would’ve been polished up and released to the world as the debut Freshco and Miz album at the turn of the 90s. It’s pretty fantastic straight thru, and even if nothing else quite rises to the level of that one track, well neither does nine-tenths of all hip-hop recorded by anybody before or since.
It’s available to buy HERE, and if you’re still reading at this point and have any interest in classic-era hip-hop I’ll hope you’ve already clicked the link and purchased it. It may have been released a decade and a half too late and be relegated to a footnote in hip-hop history, but man… What a fine footnote it is.
[Of the originally released F&M tracks, “Ain’t U Freshco?” is available on this compilation, Freshco’s debut single “4 At A Time” is on this CD, and the other three tracks remain commercially unavailable on disc or as downloads. The official Freshco and Miz site (with history, photos and music) is here. And an interview with Shawn “Freshco” Conrad with plenty of additional context and some fun stories can be found here.]
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