Complimentary Egg Roll With Your Order

This 45 comes free with Percee-P's Perseverence album if you buy it from many online sources (accesshiphop, ughh, etc). Most places seem to offer it (with the CD or the LP), so if you're buying from someplace that doesn't carry the package deal, you may want to cancel that order. Because, yeah; you'll be wanting this.

The whole album is pretty good. Like I (and practically everybody else, to be honest) predicted in an earlier thread, Percee dependably kills it on the mic, and the production, entirely by Madlib, is decent, but not great. At its best there are some nice, dusty loops ("Ghetto Rhyme Stories" is a particular stand out), while at its worst, it sounds like the soundtrack to a Sega Genesis game. It's definitely a dope, very worth having album… but if he'd dropped a few weak guest MCs who can't keep up with Perc (like Vinnie Paz and Guilty Simpson… I mean, whose dumb idea was it to make THAT song the new single, anyway?) in favor of some obvious guest producer choices (Showbiz, Diamond, Buckwild, Premiere, Finesse)… this could've really been the album we'd been waiting for all these years. As it is, it's just a good, solid album - which you can easily quibble about, but you'd be missing out if you passed up on.

So, now getting to this 7": it's "The Hand That Leads You (Egg Roll Version)" b/w the instrumental. When this was still a pre-order, most sites just said, "free Stones Throw 45," so it was to discover we'd gotten a proper Percee-P non-album single, rather than just a label sampler of snippets or something.

It's called the "Egg Roll Version" because the bulk of the instrumentation is sampled from "Egg Roll" by the late Philly-based 60's funk/jazz collective, The M&S Band, a rare/obscure release later popularized (well, as far as these things go) in the late 90's on the Funk 45 reissue label. And this mix (also done by Madlib) is hot… much better than the LP version; and that was one of the stronger album cuts itself. It's just a couple of massive horn loops, with some nice scratching on the hook, provided by J-Rocc of The Beat Junkies… these are hotterthan most of Madlib's scratches - which I'm guessing by the sound of 'em are done on Serato (Madlib provides the scratching on the LP version and most of the album tracks; though J-Rocc did two; including the aforementioned stand out, "Ghetto Rhyme Stories"). On this mix, the emphasis is more on the actual scratching and less on the amount of vocal samples that can be squeezed into sixty seconds. Stand out beats like this are definitely up to headnodding par with anything Showbiz would've provided, anyway.

So, yeah. Get the album; and make sure you get this 7" with it. And let's hope the success of this project will encourage Percee to keep putting out records on the regular.

Tags: Percee-P, Madlib, J-Rocc