Old School Mondays:: Kool G. Rap & DJ Polo (Road To The Riches Edition)

Greetings, some warm, old school wishes go out to you and yours on this fine Monday. Today's OSM features, truly, one of my favorite albums from back in the day - in fact it belongs to a select sub-group in my cassette collection: those that I played so much that they're almost ruined. Unless I'm mistaken, I got this album on a late 80's trip to the states, and it go so much play during walks to school and paper route deliveries, that the plastic spindles came loose and it became a bit of elaborate configuring to each time I wanted to play it.

So I like Kool G. Rap & DJ Polo's Road To The Riches, well big deal, I'm certainly not alone here, it's something of a classic as far as hip hop goes. But why are we featuring it this week you ask? Well I'm tempted to simply answer "because I looked at the cover again the other day for the first time in a while, and I realized Polo was actually wearing a polo hat", because I did, and that is awesome, but it really isn't the reason. I actually mentioned G. Rap and Polo a couple weeks ago in an OSM that featured songs that use the Fatback Band sample that k-os used for his first single off his new album. That got me thinking about G. Rap, and my fondness for Road To The Riches had me wondering if we'd ever posted anything from the album for OSM. It turns out we hadn't, and so we're fixing that right now.

Anyone have a problem with that? I wouldn't think so, after all, G. Rap is one of the most beloved MC's from the golden age, albeit one that likely never got the credit or acclaim from the world at large that he deserved. But that's another reason why I decided to give this album the OSM treatment, because any little bit of shine we can give to a much-deserving legend like G. Rap is a good thing in my humble. And in most people's opinion, I mean, when you consider how great the songs on Road To The Riches are for '89, it's hard to pick just a few for posting. G. Rap's complex, yet hardcore, flow steals the show on pretty much every song, but Marley Marl's production is a close second (anyone else think Marley might not get the credit he deserves? A potential future OSM topic perhaps? You never know). Oh, and Polo is there too, and he scratches sometimes!

Anyway, as I said, pretty much everything on here is solid (even the "breakup" song Truly Yours is better than anything similar from that time period), so I couldn't lose. So I went with the two classics, Road To The Riches and Poison, and then a personal favorite, the harmonica-laced Trilogy of Terror. Enjoy.