Break Free: DJ Rob Swift Hip-Hop Mixtape Volume 1

Why is it that “Walk This Way” can only be perceived as Hip Hop when RUN DMC rap the lyrics?

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This was a statement I made on Instagram last night that rather irritated a handful of my followers. “Huge reach lol” and “Walk This Way is a ROCK N ROLL song not a HIP HOP song” are two of the many comments directed towards me. So as a result, I decided to upload a private HIP-HOP mix I made for my own personal use about 10 years ago.

To keep it simple, the following 60 minutes will introduce you to pure as the driven snow HIP HOP music! Not the product that’s been packaged and sold for mass consumption since Sugar Hill Records released “Rappers Delight” in 1979. This is a private mix I’m making public to help exemplify just how genre fluid undiluted HIP-HOP sounds. If you’re closed minded or so far removed from the first decade of HIP-HOP that your understanding of it is limited to the boundaries of image and sound the media, music industry and Hollywood confine the genre to, then you’ll dismiss my mix as a collection of Disco, Soul, Rock, etc., songs played together in one hour.

But if you manage to break free from the genre’s corporate radius which describes it as “a rapper accompanied by an instrumental track created by a producer,” then you’ll acknowledge how the inherent interconnectedness of sound is what makes Hip Hop, HIP-HOP! Then you’re thinking like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Breakout, Grandmaster Flash, GrandWizzard Theodore, Jazzy Jay, Red Alert, Grandmixer D.St, Kool DJ AJ, and the rest of the ORIGINAL OPEN FORMAT DJs! Disc Jockeys who believed HIP-HOP had the power to transcend boundaries and defy categorization.

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Funk, R&B, Jazz, Disco, you name it, is HIP-HOP when I play it because of WHAT I DO TO THE MUSIC as it’s playing! Consider this an invite for you to experience the limitlessness that is a HIP-HOP mixtape!

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