K-Swift The Club Queen - Jumpoff Vol. 11: Not Guilty (Unruly Records/Next Level)

Last time I wrote about a K-Swift CD, I said I was gonna try and judge her club music mixes on their own merits, and not dwell on the controversy around her and 92Q too much. She makes that a little harder to do with her latest Jump Off mix, though, by titling it Not Guilty and opening it with a courtroom skit, which is pretty long and annoying, and basically brushes off any rumors of wrongdoing as just haters mad at the popularity of her mix CDs and doesn't really address what the actual accusations against her are. Don't get me wrong, whoever "The New Republic" are, they might just haters who are jealous of K-Swift and Next Level's success, but we can't really know that for sure, since, as the City Paper's Bret McCabe has pointed out, they're saying all this under the shield of anonymity and are, in doing so, total gutless cowards. I'm a little uneasy about speaking about this stuff in public because the last thing I want to be seen as is a hater or an enemy of K-Swift or 92Q, I'm a listener and a fan, but I'm not gonna hide behind a pseudonym to the address the issue publicly if I do have questions or observations about it.

But back to the music, this is yet another solid club music mix. One thing I noticed pretty quickly was the notable absence of Rod Lee and Blaq Starr, two producers who've been present on practically every other K-Swift mix CD I've ever seen. But then, they've both got recent CDs in Downtown Locker Room right now, too, so maybe she's just keeping the demand high for people to buy their mixes instead of just getting their tracks on her mixes, I dunno. Lil Jay does a couple remixes of Blaq Starr songs ("Feel It In The Air" and "Hands Up Thumbs Down" redone as "Represent That"), but I'm not real impressed by those and they just aren't nearly as hot as the originals. But there's still a lot of great tracks like K.W. Griff's insane remix of "We Takin' Over," Say Wut's awesome new songs, "Futuristic" and "Get Loose," so it's a good one to pick up.

Mike Marvelous - "Tear It Up" (mp3)
This is some serious serious shit, I couldn't believe it when I first heard it on the radio. The whispered "let the bodies hit the floor" chant is a sample from the nu-metal band Drowning Pool's "Bodies," a song was big on rock radio about 6 years ago (and then was one of the songs pulled from the airwaves right after 9/11). And here Mike Marvelous takes that line and turns it into a straight-up dancefloor mantra that you wouldn't even think of in any other way if you hadn't heard the original track first. There's a lot of kind of novelty club tracks that remix rock songs these days and I usually think they're lame, but this one really transcends all that and is just a dope club song.

Labels: Baltimore club, K-Swift, KW Griff, mixtape/album review, mp3, Next Level Records, NSW (Say What), Unruly Records