Happy 30th Anniversary to Artifacts’ debut album Between A Rock And A Hard Place, originally released October 25, 1994.
I sometimes think about how a group like Artifacts would never get signed to a major label today. If you give me a second to sound a little like an angry old man shaking his fist at a cloud, these days artists need a catchy back-story or a “brand” or 2.5 million Instagram followers to merit considered for distribution on a major label. When Artifacts made their debut 30 years ago with Between A Rock And A Hard Place, their only “brand” was creating dope music.
Artifacts specialized in gimmick-free hip-hop. Comprised of the late Rahem “Tame One“ Brown and William “El Da Sensei” Williams, their debut album, Between A Rock And A Hard Place is a shining specimen of a no-frills, strictly-skills hip-hop album released during the mid ’90s. It’s gritty East Coast hip-hop featuring two emcees rapping over rugged tracks that sport hard-hitting drums and melodic jazz samples. And three decades later, it still holds up as one of the strongest albums of 1994.
I was pretty obsessed with this album back during my sophomore year of college. I bought an advance copy of the white label double vinyl a couple of weeks early from a record store in Philly. Since I had a radio show on the college student-run radio station (every Friday from Midnight to about 4 a.m., if I felt like it), I played damn near every track from the album on the air before the album ever dropped. Sure, no one ever heard it (we were the music on what was the equivalent of the TV Guide channel), but I felt a deep and abiding love for the dusty grooves and the blunted rhyme styling by both emcees.
Artifacts first began recording in the early ’90s under the name “That’s Them.” They met at a post-Grand Puba Brand Nubian show in Harlem, and Lord Jamar and Sadat X took them under their wings, helping them develop as artists and getting them studio time to record their demo. The pair got their “big break” after appearing live on Stretch & Bobbito’s legendary late night radio show at New York’s WKCR. Stretch Armstrong and Reef, Big Beat’s A&R rep, linked them with the label, where they made their first official appearance on the Nubian Crackers’ “Do You Wanna Hear It.”
The majority of Between A Rock is in configured in a similar vein, focusing on the rawness of the pair’s lyrics and the griminess of the beats. The majority of the beats are handled by T-Ray, a former member of the little known crew The White Boys, but best known for his allegedly voluminous record collection. He began doing tracks for artists like Double XX Posse and MC Serch, before building a long affiliation with the Soul Assassins collective.
Buckwild handles much of the rest of the album’s production, applying the styles he learned while working with the Diamond Ds and Showbizes of the world and creating his own signature sound. Just the week before he’d received some of his highest profile placements at the time, producing some of the best known tracks on O.C.’s debut album Word…Life (1994). He utilized dark, layered production, often capped with a dusting of sleigh bells.
Buckwild employs these production techniques on the album-opening “C’mon With The Get Down,” Between A Rock’s second single. Using a rough sample from Galt McDermott’s version of “Ripped Apart By Metal Explosions,” El and Tame lean heavily into some straight emcee shit, as El warns enemies, “Notify that: the Artifacts never slack / While crews is on stage wack, we just play the back,” while Tame asserts, “emcees who used to diss us get pissed ’cause they ain’t shit now.”
Listen to the Album:
“Wrong Side Of The Tracks,” the album’s first single, is arguably the best-known track by the group. The song serves as an ode to late-night graffiti missions throughout the New Jersey/New York area. The song effectively captures the sights, sounds, textures, and smells of throwing up giant pieces, or tagging up trains and wells with Magnum Sharpies and stickers. There are very few songs recorded that capture the authenticity of what it’s like to roam the streets and subways looking for the perfect spot to “bomb.” The beat, mostly built around a sample of 9th Creation’s “Bubble Gum,” features one of the dopest and most recognizable horn samples of the mid-’90s, making excellent use of the sax solo from Jack Bruce’s “Born to Be Blue.”
Artifacts’ strength lay in kicking rhymes about their own dopeness as emcees. Tracks like “Heavy Ammunition” and “Attack of New Jeruzalem” are swirling engines of lyrical and musical energy; the latter is a Buckwild-produced re-working of a song that appeared on their early demos. Tame and El pass the mic back and forth like an even more stoned version of EPMD on “Flexi Wit the Tech(nique).” As the bassline lumbers forward, balanced by showers of piano notes, the pair shows incredible chemistry while rhyming together.
They display this tag-team chemistry again on “Notty Headed N****z,” overall the best track on the album. A dense concoction of overlapping horn samples and a crispy drum track, Tame delivers one of my favorite verses ever, rapping as the track breaks down, “Well, it’s the wise guy, who never did a drive-by / But I fly zones, and shine like chrome, on 735i / Play my Hi-Fi volume up sky high / Talking Buddha Thai, don’t bother trying to fascinate my eye.”
The crew honors hip-hop’s ’80s era with “Whayback,” reminiscing about life in Newark during the mid 1980s. The track plays like a less metaphorical version of Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” as the pair presents a picture of a time when the idea of hip-hop culture was still relatively new. The song features nostalgic references to Mr. Magic’s radio show, Graffiti Rock, and, fashion-wise, “Cazals with no glass, dark flavored Clarks, Lee Denims off the ass.”
And though the duo don’t shy away from the era’s rough edge, they still remember a more “honorable” time for the music. “Remember the time when you didn’t pack a nine?” El ponders. “N****s just came to hear some, funky ass rhymes.” Pining for the good old days smack dab in the midst of the music’s golden era again seems a little weird in hindsight, but as in all eras of hip-hop, what was happening in the mainstream was still pretty different.
Like most self-respecting hip-hop artists from the Tri-State area during the mid ’90s, Artifacts enjoyed indulging in marijuana, and like many of these groups, they devoted a song on Between A Rock to their love of this indulgence. “Lower Da Boom” is a murky, muffled dedication to the joy that comes from puffing on good greenery. T-Ray heavily filters a loop from Amanda Ambrose’s “Sad Song,” accentuating the song’s heavy bass. Neither Tame nor El reinvent the wheel, but it still makes for good music.
And sometimes it’s just good to hear hard-hitting hip-hop. Tracks like “Cummin’ Thru Ya Fuckin’ Block” and “Dynamite Soul” definitely fill that need. Tame’s cousin, Redman, produces the former track, a bouncy yet dusted entrée, featuring the Funky Doctor Spock himself on the chorus and adlibs, adding his blunted sensibilities to the song.
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Fittingly, Between A Rock ends with “Wassup Now Mutherfucka?”, a little under two-and-a-half minute track where El and Tame kick a pair of quick verses. The track is stripped down hip-hop, as T-Ray concocts a track composed from the opening drum break and guitar licks from Joe Farrell’s “Upon This Rock.” While El kicks a lengthier verse chronicling a day traversing Newark, Tame is in a boastful mode, proclaiming, “ I got much pride, electric sliding suckers backwards / Like Mike Jackson, throwing hats in, the Artifacts hitting.”
I guess it’s another sign of the times that even though Between A Rock And A Hard Place was considered a commercial letdown, the group released a second album through Big Beat, That’s Them (1997). These days a group like Artifacts wouldn’t have gotten that chance. Hell, if they’d have come out today, probably the only way I’d have ever heard about them is if someone would have hipped me to their Bandcamp page.
However, thanks to groups like Artifacts, there’s a place for groups that could record boom-bap, backpacker-oriented projects and still have a core audience hungry for these rugged styles. Between A Rock And A Hard Place is pure hip-hop at its core, with no pretensions, and it still deserves to be celebrated.
LISTEN:
Editor's note: this anniversary tribute was originally published in 2019 and has since been edited for accuracy and timeliness.