Serdar | Genji Press

“This has been an age of Freud,” the voice blares from the megaphone, “an age of pragmatism, behaviorism, relativism, secularism, materialism — an age where all the emphasis has been upon the ingenuity of science! I am convinced that our time is desperately short!” Tackhead Tape Time opens with those words, and is a fitting soundtrack to a world that inspires such fulmination.

In old-school Newark, New Jersey b-boy slang, a “tackhead” is a hip-hopper — a tough appellation for tough folks from a very tough town. Small surprise that the name would inspire one of the toughest albums ever recorded: Tackhead Tape Time, from (Gary Clail’s) Tackhead Sound System. The group credit on the sleeve tells it: This isn’t Gary Clail, and this isn’t Tackhead, but a hybrid product of a meeting of multiple minds. It may be one of the best albums I own — tight, excellently recorded and produced, and endlessly listenable. It’s also important because it features some of the most critical names to grace modern music, even if you don’t notice their influences immediately.