Terminator X - & the Valley of the Jeep Beets LP

Rush/Columbia (1991)

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.

There's fewer and fewer hip hop albums that I had as a teenager on CD that I need to replace with vinyl, but this Terminator X album checks another off the list.  I don't have this CD anymore, it must not have survived one of the many CD purges that I did in the early 2000s trying to survive on a shitty music industry salary.  My buddy Zach actually reminded me of the record again a couple of months ago when he posted a picture of his CD.  This was on my radar, but I put a little more emphasis on tracking it down and now it's here.

It still holds up as a great album I think and in a lot of ways, I like it even more now than I did back in 1991.  I'm pretty positive the reason I bought this CD way back when was because I saw the video for "Buck Whylin'" on Yo! MTV Raps.  With Chuck D and Sista Soulja holding down the vocals, it's essentially a Public Enemy song without Flav.  The production is great and Chuck really turns in a great performance.  Soulja's "We are at war" battle cry also hits unusually hard in 2022.

The rest of the record is also a lot of fun.  The beats are consistently good throughout and a lot of MCs that really never got a chance to shine elsewhere turn in some cool performances.  In particular, I just love the song "Back to the Scene of the Bass" featuring a group called The Interrogators that I was never able to find out anything more about back in the 90s.  And guess what, in 2022, there's really no information about them either.  Kind of weird, but man what a song.

While no one would ever say this is as good as any of the Public Enemy albums of that era, it's a lot of fun and one I recommend picking up if you see the CD in a used bin somewhere.  Terminator apparently did another record in '94 that I was completely unaware of.  I'm going to have to check that out to see if it's anything like this one.

Terminator X - & the Valley of the Jeep Beets:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_m7AcBj6xwdi2Mo-HuDbK8Bh6ytLQoga2U