Big up to EDAN for discovering this. Kool Keith and Ced Gee rhyme about the NBA Allstars of 1989, with the funky drummer drummin’. Fresh on so many levels.

    The Ultramagnetic MC’s pick an odd time to reenter the game, with the paradigms having shifted from gold chains and “show and prove” battle rhyme templates over James Brown samples, to a rap world dominated by talk of drugs, guns and money over dark synthesizer lines. So what is the influential group to do? Release a throwback that brings fans back to the glory days of “Ego Trippin?” or tiptoe unknowingly into a rap world that is barely recognizable for the quartet?

    Right away, the MC’s show they favor the latter with the dark, rumbling horns and spacey sound effects of “The Plaques”. Kool Keith, who may be incapable of rhyming about anything that makes sense, stays true to his off color personality, but Ced-Gee and the rest of the group sound much less convincing talking about ultrahard, generic modern rap archetypes and end up coming across as boring and uncreative.

     The reoccurring theme of overly basic production, uninspired lyrics and out of date references plagues the album and really makes for an uneven and difficult listen. It’s tough to sound hard when you open up a track claiming, “This shit is bananas,” when the last artist to use the phrase was Gwen Stefani. And nothing, nothing, nothing excuses possibly the worst hook of the last decade on “Late Night Rumble” Other letdowns include the monotonous whine and bizarre lyrics of  “Underwear Pissy” and the clear attempt at a club record with “Party Started”, with a beat that sounds like a ringtone from one of the old huge Nokia phones. 

  To be fair, The Best Kept Secret, despite all its weak points isn’t entirely awful. Surprisingly, some of the production shines, like on the fresh, airy sounding “Mechanism Nice” or the funky wah-wah guitar and the slow, bouncy horns of “Porno Star Part 2″. Plus, it’s admittedly a little refreshing to hear Keith spit about crazy, colorful, images as if he was reading hieroglyphics. The real problem though, is the disc’s inconsistency to deliver even a single quality song. Every time it seems the MC’s might present something worthwhile, its ruined by either a meaningless verse or one of the album’s many atrocious, mindless hooks.

     Really, the problem that the group is struggling with most is that they are not relevant enough to make an album that truly reflects their proven strengths, not versatile enough to cross over and be a force in today’s rap scene, and not creative enough to find an effective hybrid between their past sound and the present popular sounds in Hip-Hop. The album sounds tired and overplayed even on the first listen, continuously only meriting disappointment. It won’t win the group any new fans and their old fans won’t be able to help feeling let down. While their legacy will eternally be preserved through the importance of Critical Beatdown in Hip-Hop history: The Best Kept Secret is something Kool Keith, Ced Gee, Moe Luv, and TR Love should have kept private: this group has lost all of its magnetism.

     The greatest hip-hop album of all time? For some, it’s Nas’ Illmatic, for others, it’s Boogie Down Productions’s Criminal Minded. For this critic, it’s Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, and for another group of people, it’s Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. But among these staples that have shaped hip-hop music over the last twenty years, one release that you don’t typically hear listed is Ultramagnetic MC’s Critical Beatdown. While those that call this the greatest hip-hop ever recorded are smaller in number than some of the other aforementioned releases, Critical Beatdown is perhaps more influential then any of them, because without this release, many of these others may have never existed. The influence of Critical Beatdown sits somewhere very high atop the hip-hop hierarchy pyramid, as it laid the foundation of how hip-hop records are created, with it’s blueprint still being followed even today.

     While Critical Beatdown dropped in 1988, it slowly began to take form as early as 1986, with the release of the “Ego Trippin” single, which featured rhyme scientists Kool Keith and Ced Gee taking indirect shots at Run DMC (“Say what, Peter Piper? To hell with childish rhymes….”), over the Melvin Bliss’ “Synthetic Substitution” breakbeat, while now revealed mystery man, Mike, laid the simple, yet spaced-out hook “MC Ultraaaa (Magnetic, Magnetic)….”, that still rings so clearly in the fans’ heads today. However, while the hungry Ultramagnetic MC’s took a few potshots at Run DMC early on, they almost catered to that audience with their 1987 follow-up single, “Traveling At The Speed Of Thought” (even more-so on the album version, by similarly employing a rock guitar loop and big, chopped drums). They did return to form with “Mentally Mad” b/w “Funky”, however neither of the 12-inch recordings made it the original version of Critical Beatdown, as “Funky” was replaced by a remix. When 1988 hit, they perfected the sound that would encompass Critical Beatdown with it’s lead singles “Watch Me Now” and “Ease Back”, where Ced-Gee brilliantly meshed layers of SP-1200 chopped funk and soul samples, before it was the thing to do.

      Boogie Down Productions dropped Criminal Minded one year earlier in 1987, and unbeknown to most, Ultra’s Ced Gee was the wizard behind the boards, despite the album’s back cover which read: “All cuts written and produced by KRS-ONE and Scott La Rock - Special Thanks To Ced Gee”. So while many would hail La Rock as the innovator of using the SP-1200 to chop beats up, rather than to simply loop them, the real credit belonged to Ced. But if imitation is the sincerest form flattery, Ced would get unspoken credit with the release of Critical Beatdown. Soon everyone was taking Ced’s approach to beat-making, and Ced knew it (“I’m amply the best producer/ at making rap music / I know how to use it / so just watch me”). Not only that, many of the now familiar samples used on this album were first used on Critical Beatdown, but ironically popularized instead by acts like Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock, Kool Keith, and Big Daddy Kane.

      But Ced-Gee wasn’t the only history-making element of Ultramagnetic MC’s, as these four horsemen also birthed Dr. Octagon  himself, Kool Keith. Not only was Ultra pioneering the style of hip-hop production, but rap android Kool Keith was reshaping the way rhymes were written and delivered. In arguably his most prolific form, Keith was Ultra’s star, with a rich vocabulary, spitting abstract ideas in rhyme that hadn’t been heard before (“I’m cold chillin’ or wearing a rhyme to keep warm….”) and entire verses about brain dissection (“I’ll put your brain in slow motion like lotion and let it float in the ocean, and then I drown it….” ), not to mention more mentally mad lyrics about eating roaches and mouse (not mice). For better or for worse, Keith was the original scientifically smart rapper, paving the way for acts like Organized Konfusion, Ras Kass, and MF Doom, not to mention he was spitting these off-the-wall freestyle rhymes faster than the mind could process them.

      Today’s generation may have a hard time grasping why this album is a classic, as to them it would probably sound outdated. However, anyone who grew up in this era, even those that chose Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim or Big Daddy Kane over Ultramag, could appreciate it today, even if they slept the first time around. Regardless, Critical Beatdown should be peeped by all, as it has influenced the entire spectrum of hip-hop in some form or fashion.