Chaotic Cocktails: Warped Drink Ideas Your Friends Will Hate

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only rehab.

Breakup Gaming Society proudly unveils the complete cycle of cocktails/shots dedicated to the four Ruinous Powers of Warhammer: 40,000.

Neither Games Workshop nor any of these fine distillers recommend doing any of this.

Fetid Haze (Featured on Ep. 5, “The Fruits of Decay”)
• 1 oz. Pikes Peak Hill Shine
• Generous dash of El Yucateco Green Chile Habanero Sauce
• Easy Cheese Cheddar 'n Bacon Cheese Snack.
To Prepare:
Shake Shine and Habanero then strain into shot glass rimmed with the cheese stuff.

The Butcher’s Nail (Featured on Ep. 27, “Debauchery at the Black Monarch Hotel”)
• 1 oz. Deviation Mountain Herb Gin
• Splash of Clamato
To Prepare:
Pour all ingredients into empty 12-gauge shell. Cover top with hand, pop on counter, down the hatch.

The Prince’s Palindrome (Featured on Ep. 19, “The Slaaneshi Super Shot That Gave Xian PTSD”)
• Boost Canned Oxygen
• Slaaneshi Combat Drug
• Yukon Jack Perma Frost Schnapps
To Prepare:
Arrange on table one shot glass of schnapps, then small pile of combat drug, then oxygen, then more combat drug, then another shot of schnapps. Chosen cultist must work their way through entire palindrome in less than 30 seconds or face the disfavor of Slaanesh.

Inoculation Against Predictability (Featured on Ep. 57, “I’m Tired Tell Me What to Drink and Play”)
• 1.5 oz. Basil Hayden Bourbon
• .25 oz. Galliano
• .25 oz. Goldschlager
• Angostura Cocoa Bitters
To Prepare:
Pour liquors into shaker with ice, add a few dashes of the cocoa bitters, strain into glass. For heightened effect, chase with one capsule of ground Psilocybin. Repeat four or five times, then call your parents and record it.

Check Out This Original Poem I Wrote

Flaptoast
You can keep your tendies and sauces

Tonight it's fresh off the wing
writhing and crunchy
and tearing holes in the bread with its final struggle

You thank the bird eye to eye
before the incisors snip the hollow neck
but only if you bear down like you mean it

This night is like no other

No you cannot connect to my speaker
we're not listening to your shit

Stop talking about Costa Rica
you were boring when you went to Costa Rica
and you were boring when you got back

The stars have moved again over the patio
and you're still sitting there
with your warbler on Sara Lee ready to go 
like you don't even know how to party

Bitch
I just made you flaptoast

Halley’s Comet: Hexagram 42, Line 3

“There should be a big book listing all the families that benefited by Halley’s Comet and all the rest of us that it doesn’t give two shits about.”
@TheJK, Breakup Gaming Society’s Spiritual Advisor

Persona-Based Podcast Marketing: Thoughts for 2022

In just two minutes and 27 seconds, I lay out the core strategy for keeping your listener base as small as possible.

Norman Invasions Reveal the Weakness of a Tattered Mind: Thoughts on Learning a New Solo Card Game

I’m playing as the Saxons in the Battle of Hastings.

The Normans are cranking out more and better units than I have. My central formation is about to collapse. I’m fine with this. Satisfied and proud, even, because getting this far required me to:

• Win a battle with my resentful and frenetic squirrel brain

• Accept that for this phase of my life, I chose to be a solo gamer in every sense of the word

Things already off to a poor start in my central formation, where the Normans (blue markers) are piling on damage faster than my forces.

A few years ago I deleted both my Twitter and Facebook accounts when I found myself unable to finish a long piece in Harper’s. I couldn’t focus long enough to follow a thought through one paragraph. It was like years of scrolling had left me neurologically damaged, deaf to the form I claimed to love and practice.

I have been feeling that attenuation again — finishing a day of scrolling irritable and distracted, like my body wanted food and instead I just ate AAA batteries all day.

So I carved out a recent morning to stay off the laptop and glue my ass to the chair and play several solo rounds of Tristan Hall’s 1066, Tears to Many Mothers.

I leapt from the chair often to pace and mumble or futz with dishes in the sink. My brain started to tell me I was hungry. I wasn’t. My keening pleasure centers just wanted something with a faster payoff.

Backing Into Self-Reliance
My pride and instinct for refusal has driven me further down Colorado’s I-25 corridor for decades. When I came to rest at this location just 11 miles north of the New Mexico border, all I had were my clothes and board games — and the fantasy of a golden bachelorhood where I would conjure acolytes and debauchers out of the desert soil.

The dusty games would spring back into motion under the paws of the newly amazed. I would hit this ZIP code like a comet, architecting unforgettable nights anchored by racks of my cherry wood-smoked ribs, straight moonshine and ruthlessly vetted beats.

This has been harder to do than I thought.

Once in a while The Chaplain (and another gent who I’m provisionally calling Nasty Naz, The Cajun-Flavored Ork) shows up on the doorstep and we have a proper ripper, usually while playing Space Hulk: Death Angel.

But The Chaplain works seasonal gigs around the region and is a sporadic communicator. There are a few dozen people in town who recognize me and will chat me up, but not anybody who seems interested in learning Spartacus or Splendor or Bohnanza, even when I dangle free liquor and a summer feast alongside. (In one of the least-employed counties in Colorado, there seems to be an awful lot of wildly busy people. Or maybe they’re going crazy and need ¾ of the day to contend with themselves, as I do.)

This is my second winter here; I need new strategies to reanimate this empty table and the figure in the mirror. Nobody’s coming over. The fantasy does not nourish. I must bear down and work this soil anew until a different shoot pokes through.

When you’re running this game solo, that dial in the background has six different difficulty levels labeled and tells you how many resources the enemy has to deploy cards on each game round. In the foreground is a bunch of mom tears.

The State of the Battle

1066, Tears to Many Mothers* is a card game for two people or one irascible divorcé. There’s a big deck of cards representing Norman stuff and another deck for the Saxons.

I saw echoes of my favorite game of all time in it: four categories of card in your hand; you must manage placement of these cards and the timing/cost of their effects to not only beat the other player, but do it in a gamespace that is a story unfolding on a map. (I will bet almost anything that Tristan Hall played Warhammer 40,000: Conquest at some point in his life.)

The cards depict fighting units, key nobles and vicissitudes of the season, all of which contend for dominance in three wedges — wedges being columns of cards that can be imagined as not only major formations and their leaders, but where the influence of off-battlefield actors and events manifests.

This is accentuated by a sideboard of objective cards for each player that represent major pre-battle events: As you develop your three wedges, you simultaneously have to “destroy” objective cards until you get to the Battle of Hastings, at which point the wedges transition from positioning and harassment actions to a pitched battle.

My job today is to place enough damage markers to knock out two of the three Norman wedges or kill their CEO, Duke William FitzRobert of Normandy, who has brought hundreds of ships across the Channel and is not fucking around.

As it stands, my second wedge is due to collapse any second. Duke William cleared his objective pile two full turns before I did. The Norman deployment machine, as regulated by the dedicated rules that automate its decisions, is already spitting out ranged units and cavalry.

On my side of the field, poor Harold Godwinson, Saxon King of England, barely has any fighters. He’s wounded and he’s already been screwed over by his brother, Tostig.

I’m playing on easy mode, and will finish out the remainder of this slaughter as a learning exercise. Minor gripe: It’s especially slow going as the solo rule booklet is essentially a concordance to the two-player booklet; you can’t dive in just using the solo rules, and I’ve spent many an hour with both booklets open, scanning back and forth for all the base-game directives and solo exceptions.

All that said, I like my new winter companion so far. The flow of the game has gelled. I need another play or two to iron out some minor steps I’m probably doing wrong. I need to get more familiar with the card effects and then I’ll start to form something of a strategy. Only then will I stop reading the sheet music and start hearing the song.

But it’s only December. Plenty of cold evenings ahead to work through it and eat the occasional bowl of soup. What’s the rush? I’m too tired to flee any further south. I might as well stay here and figure it out.

Analysis: The Saxons would have done much better at the Battle of Hastings if they’d gotten their Ork elites out earlier

*Special thanks to Jason Moore a.k.a. @A_deck_of_51 a.k.a. repairmanjack, whose prodigious body of solo game reviews was pivotal to rethinking how I enjoy my hobby and settling on 1066, Tears to Many Mothers.

Half-Assed Review of a Forgettable Whiskey

It was hot out. I was irritable and tired of pretending to care about this whiskey.

Or pretending that I knew anything about anything.

Several half-attempts here at reviewing Blue Note Juke Joint Whiskey.

100 Mandatory Golden Era Hip Hop Tracks or You Get Mindwiped: Tracks #51-60

Mr. Inquisitor Hip Hop Understander is at it again, abusing bourbon in the Fortress Monastery and trying to tell everybody else what to listen to.

Below: Writeups for tracks 51-60.

51. "I Own America, Pt. 1," Slick Rick
He of the eye patch and imperial drip, he of the singular style: lilting, louche delivery; pornographic imagination, literary scene-sketching and, lest you think he's soft, one of the sharpest pens in the game when it sensed a pretender's jugular in the room. Surgical savagery from The Ruler, one of the best MCs of all time. (Somebody in some magazine said one of the rhymes on this track was one of the year's worst, but why that one? In '88, he said he was going to let his dog fuck your wife if you're wack on the mic, so I'm not seeing anything egregious here.)

52. "9th Wonder (Blackitolism)," Digable Planets
That drum track is so laid back, sometimes it feels like the snare's not going to hit on time, but like many of the tracks from Blowout Comb, the silky vibe can be deceptive: check how the mood deepens with that squelchy monotone sample in the leadoff (same sample source, I think, from "Public Enemy No. 1"), and the confidence of these MCs. This is precision craft; subtle, but not soft. (Also: "Black Ego")

53. "The Main Ingredient," Pete Rock and CL Smooth
The Golden Era kind of died for me when these two split, but before they did...this issues. On an album level, CL sits down on his flow more than in the first LP; more sure-footed, less hyper, more cohesive and effective. I picked the title track because, while nothing Rock puts his name on ever disappoints, this sample is the most addictive hook on the LP.

54. "Represent," Showbiz and AG
A friend of a friend was so passionate about Runaway Slave at a party that I bought the CD. Years later, "Represent," is still my fave. The sampling across this album is generally rowdy and raw, which I liked, and this track moreso because I'm a sucker for anything that has Big L and Finesse on it, and AG always has personality to spare.

55. "Jbeez Comin Through," Jungle Brothers
This drum sample never got old for me, especially the way the producers set it up with that noisy horn loop and heavy rhythm scratch. A liquidy sproing of a vocal sample, then we're off to the races and I'm thinking for a few seconds it stands up to any of the '90s Big Beat/breaks work. Sleight-of-hand across this album, it gets more interesting every time I hear it and these cats made it sound so easy. This is all work directly from the center of the heart.

56. "Disk and Dat," Kwest Tha Madd Ladd
Another brilliant artist partially doomed by late release/label bullshit. "101 Things To Do When I'm With Your Girl" is probably the most well-known, but I played the hell out of this one, too, with its rollicking drums/keyboard sample and time-capsule tribute to the studio tools and processes that made the tracks. I don't know if Eminem ever listed him as an influence, but listening to this, it seems he owes Kwest a debt: hyperactive, troubled and funny microphone scamp from around the way, alike in spirit and cadence.

57. "Mr. Goodbar," LL Cool J
LL and Kane were the preeminent crafters of the ladykiller/MC killer personas. Kane had the better pen overall, but he never quite purred and cooed through tales of nailing your girl the minute you turn your back like LL did. "I'm That Type of Guy" from Walking With a Panther is another great example, but this track is meaner (and also the best off Mama Said Knock You Out, you can have your boomin' systems, 'round the way girls and the title track.)

58. "It's All About Me," D-Nice
D-Nice had the looks, the voice, the confidence and the Boogie Down pedigree. Hook him up with a James Brown "Mind Power" sample and he creates one of the most irresistible examples of pre-1990 MC chest thumping around.

59. "Wordz of Wisdom," 3rd Bass
One of my favorite kinds of late '80s cuts is when they decided they finally got the track hypnotic and catchy enough (thanks to ace plundering of some Gary Wright hooks) and just piled on bars, bars and more bars, unconcerned with running time. Seems like a microphone workout like this was table stakes if you wanted to have a serious hip hop album, and Serch and Nice deliver.

60. "Sally," Stetsasonic
Every year I get older and have more frames of reference, and still, every time I hold this up to the firmament of 1988, the production still relegates other production teams to the dim recesses. Such depth. Such sparkle. Such joy. Such movement. In my version of Blade Runner, they play this for the replicants and if they don’t dance, BAM, right in the dome.

Painting My Way Out of Depression With These Merry Apocalyptic Trucks

When I get depressed and the sun sets before 5 p.m., I paint miniatures to pass the awful hours.

In this case, all the character trucks from Pandasaurus’ Wasteland Express Delivery Service.

Here are Gat’s (rear) and Big John’s (foreground) rigs

Here is Gat’s rig, more or less finished

Big John’s truck is declared road-ready

Primed Zero’s and Tweek’s rigs in tan and green, respectively, to give them a differentiated base from previous two and break the pattern I fell into with previous palettes

On Empathy, Toxic Masculinity and Selling Stuff Online to Men

Celebrate the death of the B2B marketing white paper by reading about my awesome insights into dudes.

Nobody knows how to talk about this issue, but listen to me and you’re going to make a mint.

The Chaplain’s Heroics in Space Hulk: Death Angel

Only two Marines left and a tide of Genestealers (including Adrenals) everywhere you look. The Chaplain is undetterred.

“It’s a wrap,” I told him. Both of my squads of Blood Angels Terminators had been wiped out, leaving only my teammate’s diminished squads against a hilarious amount of seething Genestealers.

The final room (in which you have to stay alive long enough to hit a victory condition) wasn’t even in sight. There were many Tyranid spawns left to perform. God knows how many attacks left to weather. I was drunk and tired and noped out.

But not the Allfather. While I stumbled room to room, drinking more, going outside for cigarettes, hypnotizing myself with music surfacing on shuffle, he stuck with the mission.

Still not sure how he did it, but he stayed at the table and stared holes in those cards, using what abilities his Blood Angels had left to pry open microscopic windows of opportunity.

And the fucker won. I stumbled through the kitchen and noted he was in the final room with one remaining fighter: Chaplain Raziel, the fighting holy man, all alone with his shredded armor, still cursing from behind his skull mask and swinging his Crozius Arcanum through thickets of xenos.

I gaped while he executed the action card that fulfilled the final room’s victory condition.

When he first came on the show, he dubbed himself Allfather in a nod to Norse mythology, but he became the Chaplain that night, incarnating the unshakeable faith of the Space Marines’ fighting priests.

Sanguinius would have been proud.

Masturbating When You’re Drunk Is Too Complicated

“My Macintosh looked like it had been dipped in beef tallow.”

Outtake from last episode that was too gross to include

The Heartbreak of a Would-Be Warhammer Dad

My best childhood friend, Jesse, had a WWII Navarone playset in which two combatants could stage an American assault on a cross-section of fortified seaside cliff, complete with German troops and two big artillery pieces in balconies of heavy-gauge molded gray plastic.

For scene-setting, it was a step above: the person setting up the Germans could position men in two or three tiers of mountain bunkers, with the rest of the combatants arranged on a plastic playmat that had some printed beach and water features.

There was a good assortment of troops: flamethrower dudes, infantry in various poses, even a few (I loved this) casualties in agony’s repose on their plastic bases. I think the Allied forces may have had a half-track.

The setup was thrilling, the quasi-godhood of miniaturization and negated time.

“Playing” was depressing; the minute the battle would start — each of us in a race to make sound effects and turn active enemy threats on their side — the magic of the setup was degraded.

There was some residual excitement in examining the carnage, but I would have been happy setting it all up again and just admiring it together. But the shooting always had to start because I couldn’t take Jesse to that place in my pre-pubescent head where possibility was nourishment enough.

Let’s Put Some Structure In Here
Large-scale tabletop wargames like Warhammer: 40,000 serve as the ideal bridge between the 12-year-old who loves the detail of exotic warriors in dioramas and the kid who, 20 years later, needs a defined structure to Pew-Pew-Pew! Yeah, Unit X is a fearless whirlwind of destruction who inspires terror across the sector with the dread whine of their whatever-cannon, but how badass is it when firing into cover against my also measurably badass dude? (Large swathes of the hobby love the lore and the painting and never bother getting an army on the table at all. I think I’m starting to understand these people. Even civilians understand: they’ll ogle at a model waaay longer than they’ll sit to learn how hits v. wounds work.)

It doesn’t hurt to have coplayers in that age-spanning psychographic: In 2010 I joined the household of my then-girlfriend and her two kids. EZ, the eldest, was 14 at the time and I knew by some of the Warhammer jokes he would crack that I had a shortcut there to quick rapport.

I was at Barnes and Noble one day and saw a copy of Space Hulk: Death Angel. About the size of a paperback. $20. It became our whole summer. He kind of screwed the pooch in his spring semester math class, so he had to dedicate a portion of each morning to online catchup courses. I had LOS to him from the kitchen table, working on client shit, and my peripheral vision was sharply attuned to the moment, usually late morning, when he would close his laptop.

“You ready?” I’d say. I would already be sorting cards before I asked. We charged our Blood Angel Terminators through the masses of Genestealers waiting in the twisted guts of the Sin of Damnation again and again. By summer’s end, the cards had a friction patina of white.

Sifting back through those sessions, I see the same piece of char bob up again and again: the pangs of not ever having had a son; the antechambers of my personality that needed not just to have companionship, but to be revered. Now, it seemed, I had an acolyte and a pal and a hobby. I upped the ante by getting him the Black Reach W40K starter kit for one of his birthdays.

The first time he broke it out in earnest, his longtime homie, R, was visiting for the weekend. Those last sweet weekends before driving age, full of monstrous fast-food orders and constant laughter. I assumed I would be in the Warhammer clubhouse. They were pitting the Orks against the Ultramarines on the living room floor, chucking dice, cussing at each other; I pointed out something about the rules that didn’t match up with what they were doing. He snarled at me. I spent the rest of the evening in the bedroom, staying out of their way and sulking like someone a fifth my age. 

The Clubhouse Schism
As he aged and eventually moved out and then the marriage failed, my foothold in this charismatic, hot-tempered and capable young man’s life shrank again. But we seemed on the verge of a Renaissance when he started coming to the first few recordings of this podcast, partying with us and playing games. It was at the tail end of one of those nights when he drunkenly said, “I’ll put together a Kill Team army if you do.”

He chose to play the elite Space Marines Deathwatch. I chose the Death Guard’s Plague Marines: putrid demon soldiers. We painted together at first under the tutelage of game shop veterans. He was setting up the game at his house and walking through solo games to learn the rules.

But those nights in the Colorado Springs clubhouse were sometimes more like a night in the trap than a boardgame get-together, and I was recklessly self-medicating through the first winter of being separated from his mom. Costly medicine.

The night he showed up with all his gear and books, I had not brought my Plague Marines (I brought them the week prior, but he didn’t show. EZ either shows or he doesn’t, and courtesy updates are not on offer.) I was drunk and high, and also distracted by all the manic cross-talk, seven people in the room, loud beats and multiple games being played on the table at once.

I didn’t understand the execution of a rule. I could tell he was hot, because he just started stripping pieces off the table and into his carry box. Let’s proceed with your interpretation and figure it out later, I tell him. It was no good: He later dragged me and my game group to his Mom and never came again.

I tried to coax him back by making contact with a young officer from one of our two local Air Force bases. We started doing booze-free Sunday tutorial sessions to eliminate distractions. He was a competitive tabletop player who got bored with routinely vaporizing my Death Guard by overcharging his Tempestus Scions’ plasma rifles. Once we increased the point ceiling and he added an Ogryn to give him some melee capability, I was tits-up. EZ never showed at any of these. Barring cartwheels in his front yard, I was out of ideas.

I moved to Southern Colorado; the remaining connective tissue dissolved. The last time we were supposed to hang out, I thought I had talked him into coming down to the Southern Command Post for the weekend. I had bought food and our favorite liquors and had been going at the kitchen linoleum with a scrub brush all morning. Noon and 1 p.m. passed. I called him. “Oh, I’m at work,” he said. That was my last effort, aside from one call of concern when his mother reported he was dating a woman who thought it was acceptable to ask for attention by holding a handgun to her head or telling her friends that he’d beaten her up.

Other material amassed for no purpose other than its own suspension: I went to OfficeMax and had all the relevant pages to my faction copied and bound so I would waste less time thumbing through the Codexes as a reference. I bought and cleaned out an old ammo box from a surplus store, custom cutting foam slabs from The Gamer’s Haven so I could carry all my Plague Marines and Blightlord Terminators and Poxwalkers and terrain in one neat martial case.

On the occasions a guest happens through, I’ll still pop it open and show them the figurines. My first few Death Guard are mostly carried on the strength of Death Guard primer and a few competently highlighted pieces of equipment, but by the time I got to my Poxwalkers, I had a magnifying visor given to me by my jeweler and I was hitting crazy detail.

I have mentally conditioned myself to the fact that my stepson has no room for me in his life, but still stew about it from time to time, the chest ever three sloppy steps behind what you know. I try to be conscious of it and chat myself through it, hoping the next high tide of sadness and bile brings more acceptance and recedes a bit earlier than before.

Still I thrill at that vile little army in the ammo box, posed in mid-step, bolters Plague Spewers and brutal blades forward, unconcerned with the intensity of Imperial fire and impervious to loss.

These seem the only things sturdy enough to bear the weight of the magics I invest in them.

Learning to Sing with Drunk Theory

The Zoom subscription earned its keep: Hopped on last week with the most hospitable crew over at Drunk Theory.

We played Encore remotely — which worked quite well over Zoom — and had a hoot.

One of the most fun BGS nights on record with some great folks. Truly.

Ken Buck is a Fucking Pussy

Get Tight, Get Loose: 13 Paintings of a Man at Drink, Vignette 1

Vignette #1: Escape!

We meet Eric Devereaux for the first time. All he does in this part is sneak out of work a bit early to have bourbon for dinner, but this kind of thing can be exhilarating on the right kind of day.

Original fiction that our founder wrote a long time ago: semi-autobiographical series of word-sketches made of himself from 1999-2006.

First one’s free.

Donations required to unlock subsequent vignettes.

Trying to eat over here.

Listen to Tracks #41-50 of Our Mandatory Golden Era Hip Hop List or You’re a Dirty Heretic

The Inquisitor has taken a break from suspiciously sniffing the shaven heads of the bound psykers aboard the nav deck of the Blade of Procrastination, issuing orders for canonization of another 10 great Golden Era tracks.

You can listen to the whole list here and improve you throwback listening time.

41. Souls of Mischief, "That’s When Ya Lost"
Bay Area underground asserting itself as an MCing force. Everybody from the heads to the white, stoned skaters in the CU Boulder dorm rooms heard "'93 Til Infinity," but this is better. Not as hooky as the "'93 Til.." sample, but harder-hitting beat and better bars. A monument to mic skills, regardless of ZIP code.

42. Leaders of the New School, "Bass is Loaded/Zearocks"
From "T.I.M.E.", Leaders of the New School's second (and I think, final) LP. Lush production and the reason I still shout out MANY STYLES and BRROOK-CHOOK-CHOOK I'M PLAYING SUPER NINTENDO while I'm making breakfast for no reason at all. Tagging "Zearocks" on to this because it's more than the usual producer-challenge interstitial: Banging snare, killer horn sample and Public Enemy snippet refashioned to announce late glory of a high-voltage crew that would never be quite the same again.

43. Jay-Z, "Reservoir Dogs"
Became my #2 all-time crew joint behind "Don't Curse" after two listens. The swagger. The wordplay. The firepower. The utter contempt for anybody else who even claims to be on the chess board. If this song were a scene from a movie, it would be the slo-mo part where nine dudes pull heat from Italian jackets striding over marble floors.

44. MC Lyte, "Shut the Eff Up! (Hoe)" 
Nothing focuses an MC so much as a) having a story to tell or b) an antagonist to dismantle. Fun track that refuses to economize; the measures keep going as long as Lyte had something to say, which was a lot. "I sensed it, predicted it, knew it would happen/You'd plop your fat ass on the scene and start rappin.'" You can tell Lyte and Milk D were having a lot of fun with this.

45. Splack Pack, "Scrub da Ground"
Crews of young Miami dudes exhorting female dancers to do EVERYTHING NASTIER is standard issue, but this track cooks a little hotter: sizzling tempo with super-efficient studio fillips that work very hard with minimal footprint. An absolute banger.

46. Kool Moe Dee, "I Go to Work"
LL made fun of his old-school pedigree and wraparound shades, but Kool Moe puts on a passionate seminar here — metaphors, internal rhymes, switching up schemes — over a big, dramatic track. Heard this for the first time decades ago and I still can't get enough of it.

47. Beatnuts, "Get Funky"
The Nuts became more prominent for their studio work and collabs a few years after this, but the debut Street Level LP will always be their magnum opus, in my view: this album sets the final jewel, production-wise, into the big-snare-and-a-jazz-hook era with their own loose, thuggish tapestry of sound. JuJu also was underrated as a rhyme writer. This and "Fried Chicken" are the primary pieces of evidence.

48. Brand Nubian, "Steal Ya Hoe"
Off In God We Trust, the full-length LP that Jamar and X did after Puba went off to do his own thing. Highlighting this one because it's such a great example of Sadat X's craft and style, as he taunts, teases and threatens all the unfortunate cuckolds in towns where the Nubian roamed. A singular manifesto of the hip hop Lothario.

49. Naughty By Nature, "Hot Potato"
I don't hear Treach mentioned enough when people are recounting the Great Golden Era MCs, because he was one, keeping it in fifth gear through an entire album and bringing along Bumpy Knuckles himself for a tag-team mic beatdown that blazes like a newborn star.

50. "Coolie High," Camp Lo
Uptown Saturday Night feels like one of those divine manifestations that slips into sight like a golden-scale fish and leaves you in wonderment; Camp Lo never made much of a splash thereafter, but I could go to the afterlife knowing I did one thing this perfect, a luminous tableau of creative cadences that takes you to some sort of otherworldly bootlegger conference/Player's Ball in a nightclub on a plane of existence where it's eternally 1:30 a.m. and people are still rolling in freshly dipped for the night.

Painting Belushi Speed Ball Miniatures: Turning Their Wallflower Drummer Into a Ranged/Melee Terror

Vinny, lead dude of Belushi Speed Ball, Breakup Gaming Society’s fave thrash band, told me their minis would be hard to paint.

Challenge accepted.

First step was to kitbash the broken arm of their drummer figure.

100 Mandatory Golden Era Hip Hop Tracks or Be Declared Excommunicate Traitorus: #31-40

We dig in the Emperor’s crates and our word is law.

Below: Writeups for tracks 31-40.

31. Black Moon, “Who Got Da Props?”

This was an instant underground classic that put Buckshot Shorty and Evil Dee on the map. Black Moon were aligned with the Boot Camp Clik (like Heltah Skeltah, Smif-N-Wessun — who became the Cocoa Brovaz after the gun manufacturer lodged a strong legal objection for obvious reasons). I remember going to a show in 2006 featuring Denver indie rappers and one of the Radio Bums dropped this beat and you looked around the room and everybody’s lip syncing it word for word.

32. Lords of the Underground, “Chief Rocka”

DoItAll and Mr. Funke, New Jersey cats with roots in the black frat scene, tear it down over a beat produced by somebody I don’t know, but engineered by Marley Marl. Sexy-as-all-get-out bassline with an echoed snare and OMIGOD HERE COMES THE CHORUS AGAIN
THE LORD CHIEF ROCKA #1 CHIEF ROCKA
THE LORD CHIEF ROCKA #1 CHIEF ROCKA
THE LORD CHIEF ROCKA #1 CHIEF ROCKA
If you got beef, you can sleep with Jimmy Hoffa.

33. Fu-Schnickens feat. Shaquille O’Neal, “What's Up Doc? (K-Cut's Fat Trac Remix)

Technically, this is Shaq featuring the Schnicks because it came off of the lumbering center’s debut rap album, Shaq Diesel, in 1993. Shaq loved these guys, although their work doesn’t seem to have aged as well as many of their peers (especially after the Schnicks’ Nervous Breakdown LP, where Chip Fu, the Caribbean speed rhymer on the squad, basically decides that he’s Mel Blanc). Nonetheless, this is a must-have party cut in my household, owing largely to the rework by K-Cut, whose horns, drums and car alarm manipulation elevates the Schnicks’ cadence to insane degrees. (Also a tasty time capsule: Fun to hear Shaq brag, “Who’s the first pick, me, word is born an’...not Christian Laettner, not Alonzo Mourning”)

34. Mad Lion, “Carpenter”

He of the gravelly, booming Jamaican style flew under the Boogie Down Productions banner for a while, getting more mileage out of gun checks, death threats and unapologetically badly sung hooks than he had a right to. His album Real Ting made more of a splash, but this banger off of Ghetto Gold & Platinum Respect flies off an absolutely monstrous beat and grimly hilarious George Michael lyric substitution in the second verse. 

35. DJ Quik, “Dollaz + Sense”

In one of the best diss tracks of all time, Quik serves up Compton’s Most Wanted’s MC Eiht on a silky slab of G-funk. You can hear the flush and gurgle of Eiht’s street cred going right down the john. The coup de grace: “E-I-H-T, should I continue?/Yeah, you left out the G ‘cause the G ain’t in you.” Toe tag.

36. Frankie Cutlass, “Puerto Rico”

Fuck you if you’re still in you’re seat when this drops and fuck you if you’re not feeling this list.

37. Wu-Tang Clan, “Extreme Punishment”

In my opinion, the best track off Wu-Tang Forever, in which the Most Iconic Big Crew in Rap stumbles after a string of legendary solo efforts like Tical and Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. The RZA raids a lot of Kung Fu flicks, but these kickoff samples take the cake; it’s menacing and driving and ominous and somehow makes every other track on this huge album look meandering and off the mark.

38. Sadat X, “The Lump Lump”

Nobody I’ve heard rhymes quite like Derek Murphy. You look at the hordes of awesome MCs across the Golden Era, how many were just lucky enough to drop the right bars on the right track because there were at least 20 dudes from their borough who were just as nice, and you appreciate more and more this true American microphone original: hard-edged, cajoling, conversational and chippy, unanswerable to common rhyme schemes. He comes off like the guy in the barber shop who could smack the shit out of you without fear of reprise and has read more books than you. “The Lump Lump” is the leadoff on the otherwise so-so Wild Cowboys, but 20 years later, this extended cautionary about the perils of catting still shines from every facet.

39. Da Bush Babees, “Wax”

One of the final golden puffs of Natives Tongues-style production and rhyming, where your weapons were linguistic and metaphorical. The producer makes a lot of atmosphere and joy, with a tiny squeak augmenting the snare, a beautiful two-note keyboard and a snippet of King Ad Rock from “The New Style.” Beautiful track where lyricists dress down the would-be microphone gangsters of the time.

40. Funkdoobiest, “XXX Funk”

Part of the Soul Assassins flotilla in the early ‘90s with Cypress Hill and House of Pain, the Doobiest’s sophomore slab made a step change in sophistication. It’s easy to get a fast start off of Muggs beats, but what happens here is remarkable, especially if you remember the cadence of Son Doobie’s rhyme patterns on Which Doobie UB?, which were sometimes so basic, they were infuriating. Not here, where he mellows his delivery while upping the complexity of his imagery and flow. While a West Coast act, this album draws heavy production inspiration from the previous four years of East Coast sound. Irresistible beat.

Hey Chuck Linart Here’s a Blog Post for You

Chuck Linart of ChuckLinart.com was listening to our episodes and was all YOU KNOW WHAT YOU NEED TO DO IS MORE WRITING like imagine if you’re a band that slaved away on an album for 18 months and you get it the way you want it and some asshole thrusts their head inside the recording booth and is all THIS ALBUM WOULD BE A LOT COOLER IF IT WAS A BOOK.

But in a quieter moment, I came to realize Chuck wasn’t exactly wrong.

So here’s a blog post for you: Suck my dick.

What do you think of that blog post?

100 Mandatory Golden Era Hip Hop Tracks or We Declare Exterminatus: #21-30

The catalog of The Most Holy grows. Kneel or know oblivion.

Below: Writeups for tracks 21-30. (Xtra thanks to Glyxphagor the Executioner)

21. Eazy-E, “No More ?’s”

The ultimate testament to the power of production in making a rapper’s name. As outlined in the biopic, Eric Wright was a crack dealer who couldn’t rap worth a shit when N.W.A. formed. Get him in crime reporting/advocacy mode, give it some storytelling structure with a novelty interview format over one of the best Dre tracks of all time? Voila. Masterpiece.

22. Intelligent Hoodlum, “Arrest the President”

This kid (later known as Tragedy Khadafi) was talking about George Herbert Walker Bush, but the sentiment still applies. In boxing they talk about “selling out” in the ring: Taking a risk to land a big blow. Marley Marl crafts a pulse-pounding, stripped-down breakbeat and siren capped by a sample stab; Hoodlum goes for it with all the oxygen, piss and vinegar in his young body: “Al Islam, read the Kuran/Grab the mic and drop bombs.”

23. A Tribe Called Quest, “We Can Get Down”

Based on the Midnight Marauders tracks that they did videos for and what the algorithms push you to, “Award Tour,” “Oh My God,” and “Electric Relaxation” are all the star efforts of this disc. The algorithms are WRONG. DJs who play these are WRONG. I mean, they’re all fine tracks, but none of them hold a candle to “We Can Get Down.” No, I will not be taking questions.

24. Nice and Smooth, “Hip Hop Junkies”

Stop thinking. Don’t listen at the fucking thing. Shut up and party. Greg Nice and Smooth B are in the house and they brought a Partridge Family sample. I love the way Smooth just purrs through his bars and Greg Nice did whatever rhymed to get the party up, producing dependably entertaining non sequiturs every verse: “I’ll be damned, gag me with a spoon/Who loves Popeye? Alice the Goon.” (I was once at a throwback hipster party in 2008 and requested that the DJ play this and he made a funny little scrunchy face because he was a fucking bitch. You’ll also want “Sometimes I Rhyme Slow” off this platter. As my old rapper friend D.O. once said, 1991 literally wouldn’t exist without these tracks.)

25. Big Daddy Kane, “It’s Hard Being the Kane”

Highly in demand after making his name during his work with Stet and De La, Prince Paul shows up to guest produce tracks for everybody, almost singlehandedly saving the crappy Taste of Chocolate LP with this undeniable party in a can. Kane’s bag of tricks were getting a little shopworn by the early ‘90s, but he hits classic form one more time over Prince Paul’s brilliant companion hooks, buildups and breakdowns. Every few measures there’s some minor, flawless new transfer of energy to subtly higher levels of excitement. What a touch he had.

26. King Tee feat. Tha Alkaholiks, “Bus Dat Ass”

The Chronic eclipsed almost everything released about this time. Sure, Dre broke Snoop and defined the West Coast sound for years. But King Tee and DJ Pooh were no slouches, giving Tha Alkaholiks an introductory bow on Tha Triflin’ Album: When a gangster legend gives you a couple guest verses on his LP, you throw lyrical haymakers on every second of mic time and leave it all in the ring, which is precisely what J-Ro, Tash and E-Swift did.

27. KMD, “Peach Fuzz”

There were a handful of Golden Era underground MCs who managed to hang in there and find even more fame as their peers were forgotten. Here, taste the humor and lyrical dynamism of KMD’s Zev Love X, riffing about how girls laugh at him because he can’t grow a real beard. Nobody’s laughing in the 2000s when he dons his supervillain mask and hits second-stage glory as MF Doom. (RIP DJ Subroc and MF Doom. Now both dudes from this group are dead. I hate this century.)

28. Yaggfu Front, “Busted Loop”

One of the more welcome developments of the early ‘90s was the pure-MCing, big-crew, call-and-response style that came out of the East. Major practitioners: Onyx, Leaders of the New School, Fu-Schnickens. Hyperactive and wholly focused on the art of “show, don’t tell” verbal ping pong with razor-sharp hype-men interjections from your squad. “Busted Loop” is one of the better specimens of this delirious little trend. Also has a video where they make a carjacking look as wholesome as a Buster Keaton reel.

29. Kwame, “The Rhythm”

I’m a sucker for when a producer uses that raspy “gasp” effect to pep up a beat. (Although nobody did it like Stet on “Sally.” God, what a beat.) Here the dapper Kwame, he of the flawless high-top fade, shows he has style to burn with heaps of clever, clever bars.

30. Black Moon, “Who Got Da Props?”

This was an instant underground classic that put Buckshot Shorty and Evil Dee on the map. Black Moon were with the Boot Camp Clik (including Heltah Skeltah, Smif-N-Wessun — who became the Cocoa Brovaz after the gun manufacturer lodged a strong objection). I remember going to a show in 2006 featuring Denver indie rappers and one of the Radio Bums dropped this beat and I looked around the room and everybody was lip syncing it word for word, and that was one of the happiest nights of my life.