A vibrant album of bubbling hip-hop, from an unsung talent who vitally contributed to the progression of the golden ages.
With Sunday Classic, we - for the very vast majority - pull out records that have long had an impact on us; all time classics, seminal recordings, culturally significant occurrences and records that we have listened to hundreds and hundreds of times. But this week is something of a more recent obsession, and an album that has been on the Drift stereo pretty hard for the last three or four months, having us searching out more about the man.
Crazy Noise is the 1989 debut album by New Haven, Connecticut rapper and producer Stezo, aka Steve Williams. Stezo was a hip-hop guy through and through, first emerging as a dancer for the hip-hop group EPMD, winning local contests as a dancer and making trips to New York’s Latin Quarter and competing with the best during hip-hop’s evolution of the late 1980s. His moves were in fact so captivating, he’d frequently catch the ire of the artists he was supporting, with the notoriously fragile MC Hammer apparently requesting the enigmatic Stezo take less of a centre stage. Don’t hurt them, man.
We don't know the exact progression from dancer to performer, but Crazy Noise was recorded between 1988 and 1989, with Stezo handling both rapping and production, asserting rare creative control for a debut artist at the time. The production is just fantastic, full of deep hitting subs and a mix of crisp drum programming and innovative funk samples (he was among the first to sample the Skull Snaps break, later used extensively throughout 1990s hip-hop). The album was released on Sleeping Bag Records and arrived at a transitional moment in hip-hop, when the sound was shifting from minimalist drum machine loops to funk-driven samples and layered rhythms. Stezo’s background as a dancer would appear to have informed his music style, with a debut that is rich on rhythmic, funky loops. Aside from the low-key charting singles To the Max, It’s My Turn, and Freak the Funk, Crazy Noise is an album of songs that you’ll feel like you already know. A staggering breakbeat sound with humour, braggadocio and proper big party energy.
Stezo is so charismatic, hitting the obligatory flexes of being the best on the mic, the guy to send ladies wild, earning dollar bills hand over fist and never being beaten - but there are some lush and understated lines about the culture and his contemporaries that really hit, with his phrasing also as vibrant and essential as anyone in the adjacent Native Tongues collective. “If I think of somethin' fly, of course i'm gonna use it”
Stezo’s legacy endures as a pioneering artist who helped shape the sound of East Coast hip-hop’s evolution from raw loops to groove-based rhythm. Crazy Noise is an underground classic of late-80s hip-hop, 44 minutes of fast clicking drums, analogue-rich samples and irrepressible charisma.
I introduced myself, we got acquainted, told her my name and she damn near fainted. 
