Eric B and Rakim: Paid in Full

Sometimes I buy albums that I don't particularly like, if I think the reason I don't like them is a fault in me — when I just haven't 'got it' yet because I haven't listened in the right way, or for long enough. Of course, you could just say that I'm being a poseur, buying music as a way of projecting an image. Who knows? Isn't everything we do motivated by vanity in the end? Isn't that what Nietzsche said?

So, yes, this is one of those. When it came out in the late 1980s, John Peel used to play it a lot on his show. I remember he delighted in pronouncing Rakim's name like he was from an Arab country — Rachheeem — even though he acknowledged that people in NYC don't usually speak that way.

But it wasn't until 2005 that I bought this. Because the music had never done much for me on the radio, but I was impressed that people were still talking and writing about the album as a rap benchmark nearly twenty years later. So I thought it must have something going for it.

I'm still working on it. I haven't played the album an awful lot since I got it. It came on holiday with us to Sicily last year, along with Belle and Sebastian and John Peel's mix album. Even then we weren't often in the mood for rap. Give me a bit more time.

Given that I didn't know if I would ever come to like the album, you might think it extravagant that I got the 'deluxe' re-issue with a second CD of extra tracks. But in this case, the extra tracks are what make it for me. For starters, they include the Coldcut remix of Paid in Full, which is better known than the album version. It's the one with those "This is a journey into sound" samples on it (which originally came from a Decca World of Stereo Action album — not a lot of people know that).

More generally, the remixes, a capella and dub versions show how the music works. They're like those Richard Rogers buildings where you can see all the pipes, risers, conduits and services. (And, by and large, I'd rather listen to these remixes done by experts than — like the Modified CD-ROM yesterday — be given some faders to do my own remixes.) I'm more interested in, more entertained by, those sonic and musical elements, and the different ways they collage together, than I am in the rapping itself. I come from a different place than those words.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Disc 2