Czarface - Every Hero Needs A Villain 2xLP

Brick (2015)

Every Wednesday, in honor of Ed Lover Dance Day from Yo! MTV Raps, I take a break from rock and roll to write a little bit about hip hop. In the late 80s and early 90s hip hop ruled my musical life. During this often called 'Golden Era' I discovered so much incredible music. As I am slowly replacing the CDs I've had for twenty-five plus years with vinyl copies, I'm going to talk about some albums that had a really important impact on me during some very formative years.

After ignorantly ignoring Czarface when they first started releasing records, I've been trying to make up for lost time and backtrack on their catalog.  I've mostly tracked down all of the main releases, but I am still looking for one of the RSD instrumental records at a nice price.  Every Hero Needs A Villain was the second Czarface record, once again featuring Esoteric and Inspectah Deck on the mic with 7L handling the production.

It's really a Golden Era style hip hop album with great, hard hitting beats and lyrics that weave in nods to Sci Fi, comics and an unusually large amount of pro wrestling references.  There are aspects of it that keep it more in the lineage of early 2000s underground hip hop, but if you had dropped this on Jive in 1993, it wouldn't really feel all that out of place.

There's a good amount of guest appearances, including MF Doom, GZA, Method Man and Large Professor.  But it never feels overcrowded or that the guests are taking away from the main Czarface MCs.  Everything just meshes together perfectly and again, I can't compliment the beats enough as they really make this a special album.  I'm not sure why Czarface wasn't on my radar for so long, but I'm doing everything I can to get current.

Czarface - Every Hero Needs A Villain:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kjwLRaGr9tlFtQaWHILSSkJA5WGMUpGsw