I remember when my big sister, Bukky, rushed through the door with a VHS tape of a “manga” everyone at school had been going crazy about. It was Wicked City, I was 8, I shouldn't have been watching Wicked City, but I did and it was great. . That was the day my sordid affair with Anime began. At that point had no idea cartoons could be like that; so violent, so sexy and so well drawn. The thing about wicked city, coming from that pre HD era is that the lighting has this warmth that, at the time, I thought could only come out of a film camera. The action was out of this world. Remember this was the early 90’s, there was no Matrix and western movies had not embraced the over-the-top style of eastern action yet. If you watch Wicked City now, it has all of the ridiculous and cynical pandering to a western crowd that a lot of Manga Entertainment dubs had back then; the superfluous swearing, the horrible sentence and speaking cadence problems in the audio dub. It’s a mess....

Pete Rock and CL Smooth – They Reminisce Over You Hip Hop as an expression of black culture feels like a now forgotten notion in popular music. Like Blues, Jazz and Rock and Roll before it, the cultural and socio-economic factors that went into nurturing these art forms is sometimes forgotten when accepted by the mainstream. For me (and I assume a lot of people out there), Hip Hop grows out of a specific black working-class culture (New York to be specific). I Love the fact that we are allowed to culturally appropriate things we admire, the things that move us, but sadly in Hip Hop only the easiest to identify elements of what bought the music into existence is what is focused on. Well the whole point to the old-man rant above is that the eponymous release by New York’s own Pete Rock and CL Smooth exemplifies all that I believe Hip Hop is all about. The thing is, it’s not just in the bars it’s in the instrumentation; the horn trill main melody that repeats is sweetly...