Old School Mondays:: R.I.P. MC Breed Edition

Because we try to derive the content for Old School Mondays here on the hill from something that comes up the previous week, there are few guaranteed ways to predict when a particular artist or group will get covered. Unfortunately, one of ways to do it is to die, and this is the sad circumstance which we find ourselves discussing the best rapper to ever come out of Flint, Michigan: Eric (MC) Breed.

I posted Breed's classic breakthrough Ain't No Future In Yo Frontin' in the summer as a accompaniment to an Awesome Dre riff, but I didn't stop to think how many Breed albums I actually owned. I have at least two (20 Below and Funkdified ) and perhaps another (The New Breed ), so there was more Breed in my past than I recalled. I'm not sure most people look back at Breed as a major player during hip hop's Golden Age, but I think he certainly had a big impact. For starters, I think he was the first guy from Michigan to make national noise, so without him I'm not sure we'd have seen those that followed (Eminem, Dilla & Slum Village, Royce, Black Milk, etc & so on).

But more than that, he was one of the first guys not from NY or LA that I remember having a big song (like Mix-A-Lot on the West Coast), and that showed folks that hip hop was being done well in all corners of the US (and continent, it was being done well in Canada too!). Anyway, I think there's plenty of people that had fond memories of his music when they heard he passed a couple weeks ago, so let's give a hearty herohill big up to Breed and celebrate his memory with a few of the better jams from his first four albums.