Clans, posses, crews & cliques

Earlier, my man Cosmo Baker texted me that he was watching X perform at South by Southwest, something he must have sandwiched in between like a dozen gigs he's playing down there today. I'm not self-involved or paranoid enough to think it's Cosmo's mission in life to make me feel like DJ Herb, but if it was, mission accomplished.

Further evidence: Cos recently finished up Too Much Posse, a colossal mix devoted to the posse cut. I'll let him explain:

Back in the days there used to be a certain formula to doing albums - meaning there were distinctive types of records that you just had to put on your album. There was the single, the rap for the girls, the club (or hip-house) jam, the DJ cut, the slow jam, the reminisce record, the shout out dedication song at the end of the record, the list goes on and on. But for the record my favorite type of record was the posse cut. This was the record where the artist would invite some of his boys to drop verses on a song, and the end result usually ended up sounding like teh best rap party that ever. Sometimes it was a crazy combination of rappers that you would never think would even bless the same city, much less the mic. Sometimes it would end up being the jump start to a legendary career. Whatever it would be, the posse cut always brought the fire.

Here is a collection of some of my favorite posse cuts of all time. The initial list I had was much longer but in the end I had to trim it down. I had to make sure that (for the most part) the entire song played on this mix - I didn't want to leave anyone out. So here it is - let's go!

The mix runs 157 minutes-- enough to fill two CDs-- and includes many of the greatest posse cuts of the 90s. I'm not really a fan of posse cuts generally but Cosmo does his thing and, as with my Kells mix, this is a situation where excess is not only appropriate, it's necessary.

The guys at Fifty One:Fifty One are hosting the mix. Follow this link and you can see the complete track listing and download the thing for free.