Why And How We Picked This Record

This is the 21st album in our Rap & Hip Hop subscription, and this has basically been on our spreadsheet of titles to do since before we launched the subscription. It’s a classic album with one of the best rap songs of all time (“Luchini AKA This Is It”). Sometimes, there’s a deeper story to our Records of the Month, but with this one, it was basically, “This is an amazing album, and it deserves to be in more record collections.”

Cameron Schaefer, Head of Music and Brand: Yeah, the timing finally just worked out on this, where almost two years later, it is finally happening. This is a staple rap record that if you like rap music, you need to own. This is one of those albums that shows up on every list from “The Best Rap Albums Ever” to “The Most Underrated Rap Albums Ever.” It’s obvious that fans of this record know how amazing this is, and I’m glad we got to do a great pressing of this.

I remember loving this in college and listening to it a bunch, and then the 33 ⅓ book about it came out, and I was reading it right around the time we made the list of titles to consider, and I was like, “This is maybe just a clear no-brainer for us,” in the same way that like, Coal Miner’s Daughter or Telefone was for our subs.

Yeah, totally.

Package Details

Our main goal with this one was to make sure that we put together the definitive package for this album. So it comes on blue and yellow vinyl, with a tip-on gatefold jacket, and with our custom stencil. Remastered by Sean Brennan, Battery Studios, NYC from the original masters, and the DMM pressed at GZ.

And this is the first time this has ever been on color vinyl, which is another thing we love to do, and it hasn’t been reissued since 2010. This isn’t the most common rap record at record stores, so it’s cool that we’re going to make it more common in collections through this.