Hip Hop/Rap: The Go! Team's Thunder, Lightning, Strike

The old high school cheer: Go bananas! Go, go bananas! Lean to the left, lean to the right, Peel that banana, and Ugh! Take a bite!

The Go! Team certainly goes bananas on their album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike. There’s so much here, so much going on, leaning, peeling, biting, going crazy.

Under the pressure of the Spectrum categorization, the Go! Team is placed in the Hip Hop/Rap section with its scratchy, crunchy analog samples really pumping up the energy. However, as you’ll see here, every track, every sample, every beat could compared to about 15 different sounds on the Spectrum and about as many off the Spectrum—commercials, cartoons, and high school football field sounds.

“Panther Dash” has Housemartins-styled harmonica and horns, echoing the Go! Team’s English Rock home environment. “Ladyflash” has much in common with the Hip Hop samples of Junior Senior. But then it’s like Schroeder sat at the piano, Lucy looking on, and everyone else doing the Peanuts gang dance to the piano on “Feelgood by Numbers.”

The raps in “The Power is On” are like field recordings of rappers on the street corner, the beats and samples added back in the studio. Someone grabs what sounds like a recorder on “Get It Together,” making the Go! Team like the Christian duo Lost & Found who also return to that elementary school instrument. There’s a tag ending on “Get It Together” that becomes the Go! Team theme cheer complete with Beastie Boys old school scratching.

Not convinced yet that the Go! Team goes bananas? Somewhere in there are also recurring theme of 60’s and 70’s symphonic strings (a.k.a. keyboards). “Huddle Formation” is like putting the right beat soundtrack to the high school cheerleaders on the sidelines of the football game. Then the album closes with “Everyone’s a V.I.P. to Someone” which is. . .Spaghetti Western film music.

So the Go! Team is in the Hip Hop/Rap section due to the beats, raps, and samples. Yet, they land near the beginning of the category signaling that this isn’t straight up rap. They’re a step beyond the soundtrack-like creations of Jon Kennedy and Naked Funk. They’re right next to the wonderful Dockrad Records sampler, Dim Apathi/No Apathy (see below), not a pure Hip Hop offering but rather rock music fully infused with Hip Hop beats.

The Go! Team make rock music by utilizing all of the tools of Hip Hop. For years I would secretly love the Hip Hop beats on soundtracks and lead-in music for TV sports, but I never really wanted to go looking through the Hip Hop CDs to find an album that would have one good single and a bunch of monotony. With the Go! Team, you can be a rock music fan but still get those crunchy beats and samples, jamming, juking, jiving, laying down that rhythm to your heart’s content.

Thanks to The Go! Team and Memphis Industries for the review copy.