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Tag: Dawhud

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The Scepter and The Sword

I fell in love with hip-hop full-tilt in 1991. It had been building up for a while by that point, but ’91 broke the dam. I was in middle school, and when I heard “By the Time I Get To Arizona” for the first time, it pushed me over the edge into hip-hop appreciation head first. With Public Enemy as the sounding board, I then branched out, forwards and backward, and across the map. Ice T and Ice Cube, LL Cool J, Naughty By Nature. Cypress Hill, Gangstarr, Digable Planets, the Native Tongues. Artifacts, Boot Camp, Wu-Tang, Mobb Deep. And each new tape I picked up just made me more excited to cop the next one. hip-hop was vibrant, it was fresh and progressive, it was building and growing; each artist and producer had a unique style, and identity, and crazy visions. To my young ears, the music was limitless.

There are things that happen with the passage of time, and with age: Looking back on the landscape of my life, from the midway point of an almost 40-year-old, I see the gradual and inevitable shift I’ve taken from active participant to spectator. I’ve moved away from the city and its frenetic creativity, my family and I now live in the woods, and I do my best to show my three young children those things I’ve discovered throughout my life, that I feel are important, and want to pass on. I play the music whenever I can. They’ve danced to Blowout Comb. Inner City Griots and Project Blowed. Kingdom Crumbs and Colored People’s Time Machine. Apocalypse ’91 has definitely still been on rotation… My crazy children know all of these albums. And recently, I’ve introduced them to a new one I feel is more than worthy of inclusion in this elite group of classics: Dawhud’s The Scepter and the Sword.

I’ve been fortunate to have been listening to this album in its various incarnations for a while now. Its inception began way back in 2013 when a particularly face-slapping track from rapper/producer Dawhud and rapper Ace-One caught the attention of the one and only DJ Premier. The track, “Battle Anybody”, which got a lot of airplay on Primo’s “Live From HeadQCourterz” program, is a slouchingly self-assured, boot-stomping show-stopper of a track, and acted as a catalyst for their creative energies as a duo.

By 2015 a full-length Dawhud and Ace-One (collectively known as David and Goliath) album was born: a raw, heavy-ass, two-headed monster of a record, with production handled by Dawhud and the Beatminerz. Although Dawhud hails from the Pacific Northwest and Ace-One is from Indianapolis, this album was full-on Brooklyn, circa ’95. As Dawhud called it, a “Tims and baseball bat video” of an album. This early version, although bearing some alternate universe-resemblance at times to the finished product, might as well be an entirely different album. Dawhud is an all-but self-professed perfectionist, and with edits and re-edits, re-recordings, and new material, The Scepter and the Sword continued to evolve. Becoming more sonically and thematically cohesive, the album coalesced into one brilliantly coherent and confident; adding participants, spawning the aptly titled mixtape Something’s Coming, and eventually eschewing the Beatminerz tracks until a later release. With Dawhud’s intricate and full production featured exclusively, through trials and tribulations the album moved forward until its release in July 2017.

And the product is sublime. Look up the definition if you’re unsure of what it means exactly. It’s the perfect balance of craft and wild spontaneity, of humble artistry and classic hip-hop bravado. As a young kid, consuming tape after tape, chasing after each artist and each release, on through the ’90s and as an adult into the new century, The Scepter and the Sword stands out like a beacon; an album that remains true to the art while simultaneously advancing it. This album, and actually quite a few others in the last 12 months, have signaled a sea change in hip-hop, a return to detailed, powerful production and dedicated lyricism. But nothing I’ve heard yet has grabbed me like this. To say it’s solid and full, and beautiful in its intricacy and depth, doesn’t do the album justice. It’s lean, no filler, no skits, no weak cuts, just a double lp’s worth of beautifully crafted songs – each as satisfying a listen as the one that comes before. There are heavy, HEAVY beats, the kind the push against your rib cage, and underneath them flow these incredible gems dug up from crates, of horn sections, vocal samples, pianos played like percussion instruments, and fuzzed-out basses. Complimenting the music, Dawhud and Ace-One’s lyrics and raps are the best either has ever laid down. Trading rhymes, alternating verses, and pulling out line after line of fresh new Rhythmic American Poetry, they easily stand aside peers (yes, PEERS) such as Masta Ace, Sadat X, and Rock from Heltah Skeltah (who all just so happen to appear on the album). The Scepter and the Sword is a record that is years in the making and is surely going to become more revered as time goes on. It’s an incredible achievement; it’s the most exciting release I’ve heard in a long time and gives me hope for a new revolution in hip-hop. Head over to Dawhud’s Bandcamp page to pick up a copy. The limited double Vinyl, with bonus tracks, is truly a thing of beauty. Listen, dance to it like my children do, and be excited about the future! (This review originally appeared on the Bring That Beat Back blog and was written by Jack Devo.)

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Basement Sessions

Northwest cat Dawhud put out this debut album in 2008, but it could have easily been from 20 years previous. Written, performed, and produced by the man himself, this 27-track record, for those reasons alone, is quite an accomplishment. But the Basement Sessions is more than just a collection of songs: This is a cohesive document from start to finish, that plays out like a well-scripted screenplay, seamlessly combining Dawhud’s personal experiences in the world of hip-hop with the more universal sounds and concepts immediately identifiable to those of us tuned in to what hip-hop was at its arguable apex.

To say it’s a unique project doesn’t quite describe how I feel about this record… It is an album unlike any other, but when a term like “unique” is thrown around one might think of Divine Styler’s Spiral Walls or Boom Bip, or something else self-indulgent and perhaps difficult to listen to. Not so here. Although in its hour-length duration Basement Sessions rarely visits anything remotely similar to today’s mainstream hip-hop, it is far from difficult or alien listening; and although it’s Dawhud’s personal story, it manages to be masterfully very un-self-indulgent. The reason being is that with Basement, Dawhud has peeled back the layers of hip-hop down to its core elements, to something universal, and keeps the language basic, pure, and easily understandable (and quite likable) to anyone familiar with the art form. Combining the story of his musical upbringing with an appropriate musical backdrop, and using the novel/film Fight Club as a fitting metaphor to weave the albums’ many songs, skits, and spoken word fragments into a cohesive, flowing monologue, this is his story of a man lucky enough to come of age at the same time hip-hop did and therefore speaks to a huge cohort of listeners who can immediately feel where he’s coming from. Basement is a colorful patchwork of breaks, funk and jazz loops, classic hip-hop samples, and storytelling; with the inclusions of the afore-mentioned skits and historical audio documents to illuminate the story further. He says it plain early on: he’s not out for money, he’s out for respect. It’s a reoccurring theme, and it’s an attitude that can be applied to his feelings about the commercialization of hip-hop in general. But with Basement Sessions he razes all the extraneous garbage that has infested hip-hop culture in recent years to the ground – no dilution here, no watering down of the pure essence of hip-hop. The 4 Elements are present, and that’s really all that matters. Dawhud paints a picture of himself that throughout the record comes into focus: That of a young man frustrated with the bullshit in life and in the garbage found in hip-hop, and throughout the narrative this man strives to better himself and through him, the art. Other reviewers have heard echoes of the second golden age of hip-hop when describing this record, but to me, I hear more evocation of the first: I hear Premier’s beats in the forefront, Ced Gee and Kool Keith’s cadences, KRS’s message, Eric B’s loop-digging. Like I hesitate to use the term “unique”, I also don’t want to say this is “old school”, as that implies something tired-out and nostalgic. But as much as the music and lyricism evoke and pay homage to the golden age of hip-hop, there is nothing tired about this record. This is fresh and vital music, as youthful as the man depicted in the story. It’s vibrant with energy, and that energy flows through the space between the drum breaks, the lyrics, and the loops. This is true school, that’s what it is, and so it never gets old. There are no tricks here, no gloss, no lasers. No choruses of “Make money money,” no glorification of drug use, no violence, no misogyny, no hating. At the same time, this isn’t some vapid party soundtrack, either. This is a testament to personal achievement, through hard work, constant refinement, and long, sleepless nights. This is taking it back to one mic and two turntables – and the holy Akai. This is strictly beats and rhymes. Dawhud does it almost completely alone, and as a personal testament, it should be that way. He is more than capable of handling all the chores here. Dawhud has other releases out there which I will present shortly, but this is the place to start. Download it, then put it on a tape, if you can find one, then put it in your walkman or boom box, if you can dig it out of storage. Turn it on, then listen; remember the past, and use that memory to build a better tomorrow. (This review originally appeared on the Bring That Beat Back blog and was written by Jack Devo.)

Basement Sessions was created in and features appearances from:

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