I was twelve years old when I was introduced to Diamond D. with the hit single ‘Sally Got A One Track Mind.’ This was a descriptive tale of a girl from the inner-city whose seductive lifestyle caught up with her quickly, but this was over a very energetic track which drove the message home in a danceable atmosphere. At the time I was only making tapes, mainly off of video shows so for many years Diamond D. just seemed like “that guy with that one song.” It wasn’t until I got a bit older in my teens that I realized how important “Diamond” was to just my own personal listening of HOP music.

In 1997 Diamond D. dropped his second album ‘Hatred, Passions And Infidelity,’ which would be the first album I heard from him. Although that album provided a couple of solid singles, as a whole it left me underwhelmed. I say this because at that time I’m not thinking about hearing anything previous from Diamond D., or at least I was not in the correct mind frame yet. Enter Quasimoto, the alias of the legend “beatconductor” Madlib, that dropped a debut album ‘The Unseen’ in the year 2000. That album I could not put down and when looking back, it served as an audio library to the samples it used to create such a unique record. It also brought me down a “rabbit’s hole” of the vocal samples it used. A good thirty percent of it came from ‘Stunts, Blunts & Hip-Hop,’ which by the early 2000’s I finally got around to. There is something about when you hear where samples came from, it can enhance one’s experience of the original.

‘Stunts, Blunts & Hip-Hop’ can seem very intimidating due to it having twenty-three tracks. Along with that the songs themselves, a lot is going on as during the early to mid-1990’s, stacking samples and using horns was simply the sound of HOP music at the time. ‘Stunts…’ on the other hand is just a different beast. Diamond D. put together an album that one could almost say shaped that very sound those years in HOP music were known for. He raps but doesn’t outrap the music; in fact like most producer/rappers he sounds the best over his own works. For just over an hour, the album doesn’t have a dull moment. Diamond D. unlocked the code to service the listener with the “dope sound,” that as a person who heard the album almost a decade later could appreciate as if I was hearing it in it’s first years.

Diamond D. doesn’t do this all on his own as he gets assistance from Large Professor, Jazzy Jay, The 45 King, Q-Tip, Lakim Shabazz and fellow D.I.T.C. member Showbiz. “Diamond” is still captain of the ship and to this day ‘Stunts, Blunts & Hip-Hop’ is still regarded as one of the more important albums in HOP music. It’s never too late to get what’s served on this menu from one of the silent greats in Hip-hop production. What did you think of the album?

Singles include:
‘Best-Kept Secret,’ ‘Sally Got A One Track Mind’ & ‘What U Heard’

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