Steve 'Flash' JuonIn rap music there’s A+, A-Plus and A Plus Tha Kid. Confused? If so, I don’t blame you. Here’s the quickest way to tell them all apart. A+ is the teen rap protege who released two solo albums in the 1990’s and then promptly vanished. A-Plus is a rapper/producer for the Hieroglyphics collective best known for his tenure in Souls of Mischief. A Plus Tha Kid is a producer who did an album with Cali rap legend Planet Asia who I reviewed exactly one time before he too disappeared. In fact in the process of writing this review I discovered that every song from Asia’s album that was embedded in that review had disappeared, so I had to go back and edit out the broken links. It beez like that sometimes.
“A+, I gotta be hip-hop’s youngest monstrosity
There isn’t anyone under 21 that can rock me
You feeling this?”
Actually, I am. “Hempstead High” is an album that’s embedded in 1999 like the fear of Y2K. DJ Clark Kent’s “Gotta Have It” personifies an era of head nodding boom bap rap with soulful samples, and A+ is not a kid this time — not that he was bad as a young man! Other than the fact this song has more than a passing resemblance to Edo.G’s “I Got to Have It,” to the point you could beat match and scratch from one to the next, what is there to knock? Both songs are good so it’s hardly a knock at all. A+ has the confidence of youth with the punchlines of a grown man and he’s legit as fuck on the right beats. Some listeners were probably less fond of the pop crossover single “Enjoy Yourself” though.
The fact that disco music was the biggest thing in America for a period of the 1970’s was met with one of the biggest backlashes pop culture has ever seen. To be frank I think the “disco SUCKS” movement had a whole lot of antagonism towards black and gay people. I just brought up a topic that’s too deep to go into here, but you can read about Disco Demolition Night and see if I’m onto something. In any event I’m sure the prevailing sentiment is that Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” is symbolic of the ripest of disco cheese… but I like my cheese blue. Ty Fyffe is not on my list for sampling this and I’m not going to blow up “Hempstead High” for it. Sure it’s a silly thing to sample and even sillier for A+ to rap “I don’t give a P-H-U-K” but the song is so fun I forgive them both.
Being signed to Kedar Entertainment gave A+ amazing access to an A-list of talent, which is why it may boggle your mind to hear Erykah Badu singing the hook on “Understand the Game.” She was a bigger star before and since doing this duet, but that’s just the level of connects available to A+ at a precise moment in time in the late 90’s. It also makes it easier to “understand the game” of featured artists here as Kedar Massenburg and distributor Universal Records were cross-promoting any pie they had their fingers in. Memphis rap legend MJG on “Watcha Weigh Me” makes sense given Tony Draper had just switched to Universal, and Chico DeBarge crooning for “It’s On You” is expected too. Lost Boyz cameos? Absolutely. They’re on “Up Top New York” and “Boyz 2 Men,” the latter of which also features Canibus. Every guest was cleared in house.
The problem is that this unintentionally turned “Hempstead High” into an album viewed suspiciously among rap consumers. Even though there were only three years between his two releases, one could easily pigeonhole this as a “sophomore slump” given how quickly his debut was left in the dust. He never charted higher than No. 36 on the R&B/Hip-Hop charts his first time around, and the highest his comeback reached was No. 60. I’m having to reach back over half a lifetime ago to remember the prevailing sentiment, but as best I can recall it was something like “Why did he bother?” There were better underground rappers and better commercial rappers in NYC let alone across the United States, and A+ just wasn’t a big enough star to warrant most people’s time.
I’m not here to drop some revisionist history and tell you that this album is a hidden gem, but I can honestly say it’s better than 70% of modern era rap, where anybody with a computer can release “an album” that not a single soul wanted. The corporate music industry was and is shady as hell, but at least it had a way of weeding out people who weren’t serious about their work, and putting a spit polish shine onto those who were. Songs like “Price of Fame” may sound a little too polished, but I’ll take it over too basement 99 out of 100 times. Looking back on his career I can tell you that A+ achieved a rare feat with “Hempstead High” — he made two consecutive albums you can still enjoy (yourself) listening to a quarter of a century later.