Jungle Brothers 'Done by the Forces of Nature' (1989)

To this day unfairly overshadowed by 1989's other alt. hip-hop/Zulu Nation milestone - 3 Feet High and Rising. The Jungle Brothers trumped their debut (Straight Out the Jungle) here and built the ark from that original Native Tongues blueprint. This is a fact acknowledged by the album's placing in the Source's top 100 hip-hop LPs of all time, but still the debut is all anybody seems to talk about. The astounding diversity of the sampling represented here is more than a match for De La Soul, the pacifist politics relayed with all the articulacy of A Tribe Called Quest and the production as densely layered as anything the Bomb Squad were producing at the time.

Musically it will just leave your head spinning. If Straight Out the Jungle was the funk album, this is the all-encompassing Afro pop album, and to my mind a definitive jazz-hop manifesto. It's a much more well-rounded affair than the (still excellent) debut, sampling everything from African trad to R&B on up, often within a single song.
Lyrically the album is as positive and (anti?)intellectual as you might expect, what with Jungle Brothers being the vanguard for the movement. They preach self-realization, address black identity with dexterity, delivering a few expertly-crafted party jams along the way; as well as a vastly superior sequel to the seminal (but dated) 'I'll House You' with 'What U Waitin 4?'.
Apparently, such conscious themes have long since passed into Afro-centric cliché within the mainstream hip-hop 'community'... so what? Black culture has always been homogenized and sold back, gutless and lobotomised, to a latent consumer herd, now more than ever. But there's always a dissenting alternative that is not for profit or ignorance. Plenty of people know it's records like this that count and provide armour for future generations... Don't miss out!

Various Artists 'Ethiopiques 1'

Bored of music? Never-ending streams of obnoxious, pasty suburbanites with amplifiers? I was until I got volume 2 of Buda Musique's Ethiopiques series, and now I've never felt better! There have been 23 of them so far, and they are all far, far, far out. The agenda for the series is Ethiopian music with the occasional overspill into neighbouring Eritrea, but the sheer range of styles covered therein is as much, if not more, that what you might find in inferior countires that never knew the wisdom of Selassie.

I was going to upload the aforementioned vol.2 which focuses on urban azmaris, in fact I've been sitting on it for a while, but using somebody else's link is much easier and where better to start than the beginning? This is a snapshot of the popular Ethiopian sound from 1969-75, and despite using some US-style jazz and 60's electric instrumentation it is nothing like you've ever heard before; they completely made it their own, much like West Africa's ever-popular Mali music, but much strangers to the senes. The overall effect is something quite hypnotic, some truly weird loping rhythms here and some mind-blowing jazzstrumentals there, all entrenched in the meandering scales of traditional Ethiopian singing, percussion and perhaps a trace of gypsy music brings to mind the black Zionist link. Sometimes it sounds like a parallel universe, non-wife beating James Brown. There aren't any Yoobtube videos for this one so you'll just have to do the clicky-click - this is one of the best things I've shared in a while so ignore at your peril.

Link nicked from hee-yer, with a few others in the ridiculously diverse series aussi:
BIG HEAD STEVENSON