Willie The Kid
#The Crates (Mixtape)
It’s hard to imagine a rapper from Grand Rapids, MI. (KMC Kru was that city’s prior rap claim to fame) named Willie The Kid approaching hip-hop with the same scholarly intensity as some loop-digging aficionado from Copenhagen or Tokyo. While WTK came up in the wake of the Trap Or Die era, appearing on a number of DJ Drama mixtapes, it became abundantly clear sometime last year that there was more to this G-Rap cat than his appearance on a remix of “Cannon.”
As the younger brother of Wu-Tang associate LA The Darkman, the pure pedigree was always in place but after releasing his debut disc on his bro’s Aphilliates imprint in 2008 (Absolute Greatness), it seems Willie decided to develop his own persona, one that has nothing to do with DJ Drama screaming all over his records.
There’s a lot to like on this 11-song opus. Lines like “you Teddy Bear n***as barely Bobby Baccalieri” and “smokin’ with some hoes/I don’t even smoke/in London who’s the bloke with the dark Locs..” are reminders that a certain brand of hip-hop is still being made. Yes, dancing and buying out the bar is fun and having money and talking about it seems to never go out of style. White Girl Mobs dropping half-slurs casually and shorties sporting upside-down crucifixes worshiping Beelzebub, that’s hip-hop, it must be right? But there’s something to be said for tradition too and WTK does his part; essentially testifying to notions like “hip-hop’s use of samples exposed me to artists/songs/styles of music I might not have ever listened to…” or “I appreciate the clever wordplay that many of hip-hop’s venerated MCs use…”
In lieu of an even fuller-bodied soap-box session but in keeping with the spirit of basement crate-digging that produced this free99 piece, here’s the type of exercise this crustified old head would like to inspire:
WTK, “No Reissue,” featuring Termanology lifts a sample from:
also sampled on:
Listen, it’s understood this is URB Mag and not The Source circa 1994, most of you prefer dubstep and electronic music with the occasional side order of hip-hop (J. Dilla, DOOM, Das Racist, Kanye, Lil’ B, etc.). This reviewer knows he can name most of the samples here and a number of other songs that embodied them, but there’s a few he can’t. Feel free to name some in the comments section. Call and response style.
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