23. The YMD—Excuse Me, This Is The Yah Mos Def (2008)
Speaking of party music,
Excuse Me, This Is The Yah Mos Def is another great throw down album. Probably minus the drugs though since these two guys are straightedge-type vegans who most likely abstain. Irregardless, this is the the kind of cathartic, yell-at-the-top-of-your-lungs album that will probably become a staple of your music collection as we approach the apocalypse.
The YMD are from my adoptive home city of Philadelphia and Philly's whole messy freak out musical aesthetic really seeps into this album despite the fact that it's of a genre—hip hop—that's normally unaffected by these things. But then this is a different kind of hip hop album. For one thing, the samples and name-dropping mostly reference hardcore. And the flow is intentionally off the beat. And the production sounds like your friend's basement. Hell even the album's running time, clocking in at a lean 27 minutes, is not the hip hop standard.
In some ways the group The YMD most remind me of are early Beastie Boys. Not so much the Beastie Boys we all know, but some alternate "what if" version of Beastie Boys that came into existence twenty years later than the actual Beastie Boys. The hardcore pedigree and bratty attitude are there, but the rawness has been taken up a few notches. And that's not bad thing.