Del The Funky Homosapien – No Need For Alarm 2xLP – Orange Vinyl (/1500)

Get On Down (2023, Reissue) 

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 thirty 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.

On this past Thanksgiving, November 23rd, Del The Funky Homosapien’s second album, No Need For Alarm, turned 30 years old. To celebrate this momentous anniversary, Get On Down reissued this album on colored vinyl. It showed up at my house on Black Friday, so I didn’t have it in time for that week’s Ed Lover Dance Day post, so we’ll get into it this week instead.

I have written about this album before, so some of this may be a bit repetitive if you read the last write up. But to try to summarize, this is my all-time favorite hip hop album of all time. When it was released in 1993, I picked it up immediately since I really loved Del’s first album from a couple of years earlier. I am pretty sure I hadn’t even seen a video or heard any songs from the album when I bought it. I was expecting something different than what was on Del’s debut because the Souls of Mischief record had been released, so I was aware of the path Hieroglyphics were pursuing. That said, I was completely unprepared for what Del was about to unleash into the world.

Hearing No Need For Alarm for the first time blew my mind. The production was like nothing I had heard before. Even the Souls record didn’t have beats that sounded quite like this. The lyrics were so rough and ready with Del creating the sort of complicated rhyme patterns that I had never really heard before. It was almost as it he was reinventing hip hop in real time before my eyes. It became the album I judged everything else against. It reshaped how I thought about hip hop and music as a whole. And I have said this before, but I’m positive this record is the foundation for me eventually getting into punk rock, when hip hop could no longer provide me what I was looking for. It’s just a monumentally important record in my life, which is why I felt that I had to buy this 30th anniversary version.

Is it really a necessary purchase? If you have the album already, probably not. It’s not really any different from the other pressing I have, sound wise. The colored vinyl is nice and the Obi is kind of fun. It also comes with a really cool poster that I think I’ll eventually get mounted and framed. For most, if you have a copy already, that’ll do. But if for some insane reason, you don’t have this record on vinyl, you should grab it right away. They do not come much better than this.

Del The Funky Homosapien – No Need For Alarm:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy0_lrerCGRmzByUFcqF9hOY6ykTomi1VDx14