Boogiemonsters HHV Records 7 Items

Songs as a psychedelic boom-bap journey

The golden years of hip-hop, as the ‘90s are often called in fan circles, not only produced greats like B.I.G., Nas and Jay-Z – the number of underground acts is hardly measurable, so many crews emerged in a short time on the East Coast, and among these mountains of records, some almost forgotten treasures can always be unearthed. The Boogiemonsters are definitely one of them: the four-piece group of Vex, Mondo, Myntric and Yodared formed in Virginia in 1993 with the mission of breathing more lyrical depth into the genre. In high school, the friends noticed their shared fascination with rap and started competing in talent contests: they eventually took first place at a Howard University hip-hop tournament and got into talks with EMI offshoot Pendulum Records. The label saw potential in the Boogiemonsters and let them make their first record, Riders of the Storm: The Underwater Album. With their single Recognized Thresholds of Negative Stress, the Crew entered Billboard’s Hot Rap Singles at #19 in 1994 – the track discusses the benefits of a carefree state of mind, and just as carefree, the almost psychedelic boom-bap beat draws the listener into the crew’s lyrical debauchery, through several phases, forming a kind of spiritual journey.

An album underwater

The Boogiemonsters wanted to distance themselves from the rest of the hip-hop world, and they hardly wanted to limit themselves to one subject area. On their album single Strange, for example, the four philosophize about the vast amounts of water that surround us every day: “See, seventy percent of the world’s underwater / Seventy percent of your body’s underwater / Seventy percent of what we live is out of range / We rearrange disorder, but niggas say we strange.” Whether the title of their record is based on the Doors song Riders on the Storm or is meant to mean something completely different remains a mystery, but their water references at least explain the subtitle The Underwater Album. Water sound effects are also found throughout the album, and beats on tracks like Honeydips in Gotham make it seem like they were recorded in a bathtub. According to Yodared, the influences for the crew’s sound were diverse: in addition to hip-hop colleagues like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, the members were also enthusiastic about Bob Marley, Nirvana and, last but not least, Jim Morrison from the Doors. And it showed: the Boogiemonsters once again testified to their sophisticated lyrical skills on the oppressively atmospheric track Old Man Jacob’s Well, which is told from the perspective of a child murderer.

Gold nuggets from the depths of the 90s

The record made it into the Top 50 on the R&B/hip-hop album charts, but shortly after its release the crew shrank by half: since they became members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Yodared and Myntric considered their Christian lifestyle incompatible with hip-hop. Left behind were Vex and Mondo, who recorded the second and last Boogiemonsters album together in 1997: God Sound, also released on the 90’s Tapes label, thoughtfully portrays the two rappers’ new spiritual orientation and, though less experimental in its beats, combines religiously tinged lyrics with the rhythmical finesse that the Underwater album already had in store. With a leaned-back attitude, the two tell stories from the most diverse perspectives of life on bass-heavy beats. After 1997, you only heard from the Boogiemonsters sporadically, and eventually they disappeared from the scene just as inconspicuously as they had come. Today, they stand for a direction in the hip-hop of the 90s that hardly excited the mainstream at the time, but left a lasting impression with its lyrical otherness and artistic ambition. The two albums of the Boogiemonsters are gold nuggets that shine out of the depths of the 90s.