The Enigmatic Awesome Dre and the Hardcore Committee

Awesome Dre and the Hardcore Committee: Frankly Speaking and Master of Philosophy

Well, in light of Junior and the Dude’s recent hip-hop posts, I figured I would add a little hip-hop that first rocked my world in 1989. Awesome Dre and the Hardcore Commitee’s You Can’t Hold Me Back was released on Priority Records soon after N.W.A.’s gangster rap classic Straight Outta Compton. I remember heading up to the local record store to see what new rap had been released that day, and the album cover instantly caught my attention. Here was this well dressed man with two men kneeling before him with their hands tied behind their back. With a parental advisory tacked on and a band name like the Hardcore Committee, I was expecting something more along the lines of gangster rap. In reality, however, Awesome Dre’s style was more like a mixture of Ice-T’s stone cold delivery with Rakim’s vocabulary.

From the opening bars of the first track “Murder Rap”, I could tell that Dre was taking hip-hop to the next level. While obviously influenced by the aforementioned Rakim and Ice T, his hardcore rhyming style mixed with intelligent metaphors would predict the direction that hip-hop was headed into in the early 90’s. It is evident to me that Dre wasn’t interested in glorifying violence. In fact, certain songs would have lines like “slayer of slander” and “I don’t do crimes- I commit rhymes” which was using death and violence as a metaphor for the manner in which he was taking care of the competition. I believe his creative use of language played in a part in influencing rappers like El-P and Aesop Rock from the Def-Jux stable, who juxtapose hardcore street-smarts with verbal dexterity.

On “Frankly Speaking”, Awesome Dre talks about keeping it real and spreading his music to the masses without receiving radio play. His DJ cuts up the “Radio-suckers never play me” line from Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause” to illustrate this point. My favorite track on this album is “Master of Philosophy”, because of it’s dope bassline, free flowing rhymes and fresh cuts. I’m not really sure where the samples come from on these two tracks, so give me a shout if you recognize them. Thanks to the rest of the crew for keeping the posts rolling over the past two months.