Various – Street Sounds Hip Hop Electro 11

The start of the demise - I'm listening now for the first time in about 38 years - It reminds me why I hardly listened to it then - and yeah, when the words "Hip Hop" appeared in the release title, it signified the time to move on..... still, it was not too long before the likes of House (+Acid), Breakbeat, Bleep, Techno, (etc), got into the music scene, so other commercially available avenues of electronic dance music appeared.

According to some notes I left inside the sleeve, I paid the princely sum of £1.99 for this from HMV in Victoria in November of 1986!

If you can't where you were when you first heard Africa Bambaataas - Planet Rock, you weren't either a break dancer in the 80's or an Electro album buyer. The series boasted fresh sounds and energy into an underground scene where many of the raps over the records were accompanied by melodic choruses fit for spinning on your body parts to. When the series moved into Hip Hop Electro some of that magic was lost as things gear closer towards lyrics which rapped about how big a gangster you were. The key releases in this series are all the early ones and the UK Fresh 86 one (Electro 13), if you are going start your collection off anywhere go straight in for UK Electro (which has mainly instrumentals) and the Crucial Electros.

I'm sure there are countless thirty-somethings who fondly the early era of the Electro series, many of whom will have stopped collecting them after a few years as times changed and the series ceased to be as fresh as it once was. No doubt in my mind the late eighties where a bit naff regarding the incorporation of electro/hip-hop within the mainstream. It just wasn't underground or original anymore. But that said, In 1986 I still enjoyed the series right up till HipHop/Electro 15. By 1987 it was done. Although Electro 11 was perhaps the beggining of the end of a good thang - it was, for a while, my personal favourite as it has some pretty hard hitting tunes on there.