Rating:
  Release Date: October 5, 2006
  Website: Spokinn Movement Website
  Label: Independent – Unknown

Spokinn Movement “60 Min. Spin Cycle” Album Review
This weekend I traveled up to the beautiful mountain town of Telluride, CO for the second time in as many months to check out another one of their music festivals: The Blues and Brews Festival. Basically, a bunch of people go to the mountains every September for three days to listen to blues music while sampling beer from over fifty national breweries. It’s a great time in some of our country’s most beautiful surroundings.

Unfortunately, it is a seven hour drive from where I live to what the locals often refer to as “T-Ride,” and the crew I roll to these shows with isn’t necessarily into hip-hop. Out of the four of us that go to these events, two are classic rock fans, one a punk rock fan, and I am the only hip-hopper among the crew. Just a few hip-hop acts have ever received props from my rocker friends, including the Roots, Outkast, K-OS, Wu-Tang and Blackalicious … artists that seem to have a wider range of styles and musical influences. Therefore, it is always a challenge picking out road trip music that appeals to all of our tastes.

For this weekend’s trip I had a stack of new underground releases to listen to, and my crew agreed to listen to a couple to give me their opinions. My friends weren’t feeling many of the underground cats, needless to say, and I was on the verge of loosing my music selection privileges. With my last selection, I threw in “60 Min. Spin Cycle,” a new release from Spokinn Movement, an NYC-based hip-hop band I had seen at a show a couple months before (click here to read about that show). I was really excited to hear this album, as their live show was off the hook, and hoped it would please my friends who were all ready to switch over to some Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead or something else along those lines.

Within minutes, the commotion had ceased and everyone was bobbing their heads to the great sounds of Spokinn Movement. The backdrop of great instrumentals, skillfully created from a combination of guitar, bass, drums and turntables, appealed to the classic rock fans who gained a sense of familiarity with the live instrumentation of the band. A couple of tastefully composed hard core rap-rock songs, which are very difficult to make correctly, appealed to the punk rock chick who gained a sense of familiarity with the aggressive rhymes and rhythms of the band’s sound. And front man iLLspOkinN’s lyrical presence, defined by a unique delivery, intellectual depth, and storytelling skills combining humor, wit, experience and emotion, caught my attention time and time again as I gained a sense of familiarity with the poetic rhyme-slinging of the band’s lead vocalist. The album quickly became the road trip favorite, and we bumped it for the majority of the weekend.

Bridging the Gap
The whole situation got me thinking about the concept of familiarity. Familiarity is basically the condition of having an established acquaintance, intimacy or understanding of any given situation. Many social psychologists believe that sense of familiarity is a very important part of a person’s social existence, including their ability to feel comfortable in uncommon situations. Spokinn Movement, with its wide range of styles and sounds, was able to establish familiarity with each member of my crew, regardless of their personal tastes, and hence bridge the gap that exists between hip-hop and so many other forms of music. As I mentioned earlier, only a very short, elite list of hip-hop musicians has accomplished that task.

A lot of underground artists seem to hold contempt for the mainstream due to its inability to recognize the brilliance of their music. However, I feel that the mainstream is not always to blame. While it is important to develop one’s own sound and image, we must remember that people like what they like often because they are familiar and comfortable with it. If hip-hop acts do nothing to try to appeal to people’s senses of familiarity, and bridge the gap between those that are followers of hip-hop culture and those who are not, they will never break through to commercial acceptance and recognition.

Spokinn Movement’s “60 Min. Spin Cycle” is one of the better and more innovative underground hip-hop releases of the year, and should turn some heads among the major labels who would be stupid not to pick up a group of musicians with such distinct yet complementary talents. Hot band, dope lyrics, new sounds, and the ability to do it live just as well as they do it on record … real hip-hop, y’all.

So check out Spokinn Movement and their exceptional debut release, “60 Min. Spin Cycle.” And if you’re in the NYC area, peep their open mic night Monday’s at Sin Sin in East Village. Peace.