[Ed. - Another “rewrite,” which is in quotes this time because, the About the Sampler section aside, it’s going up here the same way it did in the original (messy) mega-post. Still leaning toward keeping the “Who They’re For, A Little More,” and “About the Sampler” format…separating the sources too.]
The new album. 2020, y'all!
Who They’re For: Hip hop fans with a fondness for originators - e.g., one of the earlier attempts to expand the genre’s musical influences by fusing jazz, hip-hop and house music (hip-house!) - and lovers of both consciousness and fun. They came out about a decade into hip hop’s existence and still opened up one of its most fruitful sub-genres.
A Little More
“So where you had Jungle Brothers brought into the nation by Red Alert, you had Jungle Brothers bringing in Tribe and De La and we rolled out like that. Before that, it was BDP, Ultramagnetic MCs, Nice & Smooth and Mark the 45 King with Markey Fresh and the Violators. Red was mentoring all of us.”
This one starts with the thought experiment: what would it be like to grow up in New York with Kool DJ Red Alert, one of the biggest names in the beating heart of hip hop, as your uncle? The leg up didn’t hurt the Jungle Brothers, but Red Alert only gave them a platform (by playing “Braggin’ & Boastin’” on his Kiss 98.7 radio show), which left Mike G (aka, Michael Small; also the nephew), Afrika Baby Bam (aka, Nathaniel Hall), and DJ Sammy B (Sammy Burwell) with the work of changing what hip hop artists could talk about ahead of them. With musical and performance influences like Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Earth Wind & Fire as their North Star, Jungle Brothers built the Native Tongue crew one band and one artist at a time, playing together and touring together, and generally keeping an exhausting pace. They also added musical elements to hip hop beyond the funk, disco and dance breaks and pushed forward Afro-centric themes; the latter wasn’t so unusual - see, Boogie Down Productions - but Jungle Brothers, and Native Tongue as a whole, made it all sound more fun - and funny. Their 1988 release, Straight Out of the Jungle, put them on the map and they expanded it a year later with Done by the Forces of Nature. Their peers passed them - Tribe Called Quest, in particular - and they arguably arrived in the wrong moment, i.e., a couple years before hip hop’s center of gravity shifted to the West Coast, then got swallowed up by the East Coast/West Coast mess. They’re easy to research in that you don’t have to turn over too many stones to find interviews, but they have neither the history nor the drama that gives the “holy shit” moments that make these things easy to write. If I had to name the one thing that kept coming up in most of the sources I read, it’s the recording of “I’ll House You,” and why not? By most accounts, everyone involved but the Jungle Brothers gave that track the side-eye and the producer suggested recording it as a lark, something to fill some time at the end of the album. That song still seems to get a lot of play and I’ll always cherish it for the way Afrika Baby Bam describes the recording process:
“The whole point was to smack the shit out of that record like a pinball machine until it tilted into being just a dope record.”
About the Sampler
No disrespect to Jungle Brothers’ later material - e.g., “Live & Direct” and “WOAH!” from 2020’s(!) Keep It Jungle - or even their (for me, slightly sharper) older later material - e.g., “You in My Hut Now” and (favorite from the new crop) “Candy” from All That We Do, and “I Remember” and the title track from V.I.P. - but they did the best work during the first pass. That’s not such a dig because that best work is…pretty fucking awesome. Still, I wanted to get word out that Jungle Brothers put stuff out since their hey-day.
Given the four/five balance between their first two albums, I may as well own the unconscious that I like their first album best. Straight Out the Jungle is home to, in no particular order: the title track, “What’s Going On,” “Behind the Bush,” “Braggin’ & Boastin’,” and the (perhaps too faithful) cross-over classic, “I’ll House You.”
Then again…and shit, the four songs I pulled from the follow-up, Done by the Forces of Nature, have recently been voted most likely to make my 2020 Top 100. Those are: the title track (good Lord, this song and crap sound quality...), “Good Newz Comin’,” “What ‘U’ Waitin’ ‘4’,” and, personal favorite from the old crop, “Feelin’ Alright.”
It’s hard, if not impossible, to reconnect with what hearing music this novel felt like the first time around. What I can say is that a heavy balance of everything Jungle Brothers put out holds up wonderfully for me.
Sources
Wikipedia
Weekly Rap Gods interview (2018, on the occasion of Jungle Brothers’ 30th anniversary)
Okayplayer (2015, and this is a pretty good source for their day-to-day; the video clips embedded in that post give a pretty solid taste of them as artists).
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