Mantronix: The Best Of 1985-1999

It's an irony at odds with conventional wisdom: In more than 20 years of existence, the greatest contributions rap has made to music have been compositional rather than lyrical. The rise of hip-hop once again made the world aware of rhythm for the sake of rhythm, a healthy remedy to the awkward herky-jerk of new wave and the too-fast-to-be-funky non-stop party of disco. Further, the advent of sampling—previously an avant-garde technique generally practiced only by the most marginalized of musique concrete composers and studioheads—opened pop-music doors to new worlds and never-before-envisioned combinations of sound, collages of songs, and outright and obvious appropriation of riffs. England's Freestylers, a collective of musicians, rappers, toasters, and breakdancers, is huge in its homeland, no doubt in part because of the group's adept way with the music of others. From electro breakbeats a la Afrika Bambaataa to several Public Enemy cops, the members of Freestylers take, take, take with such gleeful abandon that their liberal sampling landed the band a lawsuit courtesy of Oasis. The U.S. edition of We Rock Hard rectifies the copyright snafu, and the album still simmers with percussive madness and goofy old-school flashbacks. But We Rock Hard will likely find little of the success it experienced overseas, and not because it's too sophisticated: It's actually pretty silly, partly because of—and here the irony twists once again—a lack of lyrical thrust. While Freestylers bounces from style to style, the group's various guest vocalists can't muster up much more than the usual lame shout-outs and inanities. The beat might be right and the music might be funky, but We Rock Hard is awfully dopey, and P-Funk it is not. Kurtis Mantronik, a Jamaican-born American, figured out in the mid-'80s that the beat can best be utilized when given the same musicality you might assign a more conventional song. Starting where Bambaataa left off, Mantronik (with MC Tee as Mantronix) pioneered the use of frenetic beats combined with sharp vocals, a stepping stone to dozens of subsequent dance movements, from Latin hip hop to Big Beat. Such songs as "Bassline," "Ladies," and "Who Is It" have aged pretty well, and that must really rile the instantly dated Freestylers.