Lost and Found: The Mystery of Ultimate Force
Featured Album
For those of us who regard art as an index of ideas, hopes and anxieties over time, there is a mystique to things that were never able to see the proper light of their respective days: we regard the unfinished manuscript, the sketchbook drafts and the shelved album as phantom links in a given master’s evolutionary chain. Popular music, with its tape-trading fanatics and readymade mythologies, is certainly given to this kind of speculation, though most of the time it’s pretty clear why things never escaped the vaults. Last year the Anticon label released Darc Mind‘s Symptomatic of a Greater Ill, a collection of dense cut-and-paste beats and cosmic-minded raps that was slated to come out on Loud Records in 1997. While it’s an engaging and delightfully weird album, it’s no surprise Loud – a label known for Wu-Tang Clan, Big Pun and Mobb Deep – shelved it.
But every now and then a dispatch from the past stokes the imagination and forces one to indulge in that most frustrating of pastimes, the alternate history. A good example of this is Slum Village‘s Fan-Tas-Tic (Vol. 1), which seemed to circulate for years as a secret passed hand to hand before its proper release in 2005. In the late ’90s, as the original Native Tongues seemed in need of renewal, rumors circulated of the Detroit trio’s bizarrely lo-fi debut and the otherworldly visions of their producer, Jay Dee (later J Dilla). The album was never officially released and bootlegs were nearly impossible to find, which made the ravings of Q-Tip, D’Angelo and ?uestlove all the more maddening to anyone who wanted to actually hear Slum Village for themselves. A more tragic example is Big Shots, the lone album from producer, DJ and Stones Throw Records boss Peanut Butter Wolf and his childhood friend Charizma. Boasting the kind of cavernous beats and all-attitude rhymes that were the lingua franca of early 1990s rap, the duo’s excellent debut (highlighted by “Red Light Green Light” and “My World Premier”) may have earned a place in the era’s canon, were it not for Charizma’s untimely death. Wolf took leave from music for a few years before starting Stones Throw in 1996, though it would take a few more years distance for him to finally revisit Big Shots in 2003.
In 1988 Strong City Records released “I’m Not Playing,” a single by Ultimate Force, a young Bronx duo made up of MC Master Rob and producer and DJ Diamond D. Built on the blaring guitar stabs of Albert King‘s blues-funk nugget “Cold Feet,” the song was the culmination of three years of hard work under the watchful eye of legendary producer and DJ Jazzy Jay. Jay had first risen to fame as one of Afrika Bambaataa‘s most trusted DJs, and by the mid ’80s he was mentoring a loose clique of local upstarts – kids named Fat Joe and Lord Finesse – at his Bronx studio. Ultimate Force’s debut single showed great promise, and it was the leadoff track for Cold Chillin’in the Studio, a Strong City showcase that Jay released in 1989.
Rob and Diamond continued to record tracks for their debut album, but over time Rob’s patience for the industry wore thin. Even though they had recorded dozens of quality tracks, they didn’t have a sense of when Strong City planned to release them. Rob’s hunger for rap success suffered as a result, and as the months wore on, the idea of a stable family life seemed more and more appealing – after all, this was a time before one was rewarded for saying nothing on the track. Just as Rob’s interest waned, Diamond’s grew fiercer. Diamond produced and rapped on “Best Kept Secret,” a bonus track for the Ultimate Force album. Randomly enough, it netted him the solo deal that would eventually produce the classic Stunts, Blunts and Hip-Hop and lay the foundation for one of the truly great crews in hip-hop history, Diggin in the Crates (D.I.T.C.).
Consisting of Diamond, Lord Finesse, Fat Joe, Showbiz and AG, Big L, O.C. and Buckwild, the D.I.T.C. crew’s rugged aesthetic epitomized New York’s ’90s underground – as individuals and a crew, D.I.T.C. claimed credits with everyone from Organized Konfusion and the Alkaholiks to Jay-Z and the Notorious B.I.G. And one needs look no further than “I’m Not Playing,” with its crisp drums, quaking low-end and head-bob tempo – an unconventional sound, given that rap was at its briskest circa 1988 – for the blueprint of the D.I.T.C. sound. The song has aged remarkably well, and over the years many had wondered why it was Ultimate Force’s lone release. Maybe people just weren’t ready for a rapper to use the word “knave.”
Some years after its scheduled release, I’m Not Playin’ is a fascinating time capsule of the late ’80s African-American experience. While Master Rob was as cocky as any MC back then, there’s a levity to his outlook that seems quaint today – “It’s time for some comedy,” he smiles on the fun, clownish “I Gotta Go,” while the black-is-beautiful Romeo-isms of “Girls” are delivered on a bed of tinny synths. “Revolution of the Mind” skates along with snippets of James Brown, Gil Scott-Heron and other fist-pumping soundbites, as Rob decries Reaganomics and confesses that then-hit film Do the Right Thing was “no surprise to me/ Thank God for a brother like Spike Lee.” It’s endearing to hear a still-widening Fat Joe test out his swagger on “C’mon” and the thrilling posse cut “Oh Shit.” It would be a stretch to say that Ultimate Force’s album would have changed hip-hop; more likely it simply would have been another excellent full-length during the form’s most fertile years. But its release finally answers the mystery of where Rob and Diamond were going after their brilliant lone single.
