solo hiero

Souls Of Mischief - Cab Fare

I like to think of Hieroglyphics as a psychedelic, indie Wu-Tang (with less members, of course). Huge, histrionic, historic, and notably inconsistent on the solo and spin-off output. Let's follow this to a ridiculous extreme: Del, obviously, is Ol' Dirty (brilliant, elusive, and quite fucked-up), Casual is Method Man (initially lauded but since fallen-off), Extra Prolific would be the equivalent of an Inspectah Deck / Masta Killa / U-God supergroup (underrated, but usually with good reason), Domino no doubt the RZA (the production genius), leaving Souls Of Mischief to be analogously composed of mirrors of Ghostface, the GZA, and Raekwon (the best MCs that aren't the big stars, and it fits into my rhetorical flow). Like the Shaolin Beez, these guys are habitually slept-on (let's think about Ghost pre-2005) and more likely to appear on cameos or remixes than in their own albums. Here we have an unreleased demo track, initially slated for 1995's No Man's Land. Reflecting the mid-90s love of intelligence and backpack jams, we got an excellent, post-old-school backwards drum beat, punctuated by samples from the Taxi theme. Over this, the flows is casual and storyrappin', about race and taxi cabs. Like cruisin' through the Yay on a Sunday afternoon.