drama - the second coming: illadelf ii (mixtape, 1995)
(youtube / internet archive)

we have been talking about the roots' illadelph halflife in the discord listening club and it inspired me to finally dust off the old focusrite and up this related bit of philadelphia rap ephemera – dj drama's 1995 mix, the second coming: illadelf ii.

yes, that dj drama, he of gangsta griz-illz fame. years before he would move to atlanta to attend clark and become the world's foremost semi legal distributor of '00s trap rap he was a philly-born real hip hop teenager burning his allowance at center city vinyl spots like armand's, funk-o-mart, and the layup. bahamadia was his next door neighbor and the street corner busker brother question of the (square) roots was an acquaintance / mentor. there is a whole and genuinely heartwarming questlove podcast where he and dram talk about all of this in depth and i would highly recommend it if you are the type of person who is patient enough to listen to strangers talk for hours on end.

if you'd rather just skip to the raps though hit one of the links above. as the title suggests, this is the second^[1] installment of the illadelf (with an f) mixtape series. i've never seen it or heard it but drama says the original illadelf was a freestyle tape inspired by doo wop's 95 live and that it featured appearances from dice raw, malik b, bahamadia and latter-day rasheed wallace signees 100x.^[2]

the second coming opens with an uncharacteristically low key black thought freestyle then proceeds to dig deeper into the local underground scene – tainted mindz, ruggedness madddrama, bigg tabb, merdah, chief kamachi, rasul of lost children of babylon. i'm a little too young to have experienced this wave first hand but i do remember a lot of these names still being in the air (and their records in the bins) well into the late 90s, at least until major figgaz and state prop totally flipped the city's scene and sound on its head.

most of this stuff is now unfortunately forgotten outside of the euroman limited vinyl collector / youtube city of ten thousand plays sect^[3] and while i wouldn't necessarily make the case that any of it is exactly essential listening it does offer an interesting historical snapshot of one of hip hop's more underrated cities and some crucial context for what the roots ended up doing with their own illadelph project – a locally thriving indie rap ecosystem where there was still a natural overlap between street and backpack sensibilities. (see also: ram squad, da fat cat clique.)

anyway the drama tape splits the difference between all of that and the standard issue source-endorsed rugged east coast shit that was informing it in real time – wu, boot camp, mobb, gang starr foundation, fugees, etc. and it's a bit more of a technical mix than you might've expected given drama's relatively hands off /mic on approach to the gangsta grillz series. he even gets a little busy with the scratching here and there.