"We put a lot of love into this record," says Kenneth Masters.
The record is "You Magnificent Bastard," the third release and first vinyl LP by the hip hop trio Ugly Tarantino, which features rappers Kenneth Masters, Gums, and DJ LadyX.
The album title refers to the popular film and television character trope: a magnificent bastard is a charismatic, fiercely independent character whose moral ambiguity is overshadowed by his likability. Emcees Masters and Gums are the underdog, everyman version of classic magnificent bastards, leading listeners on a track-by-track journey through an album that sounds as cinematic as its themes.
The ethos of "You Magnificent Bastard" is most explicit on the track "Trials of Glass," which begins with a sample from the 1961 film "The Hustler." The dialogue comes from the film's main character, Fast Eddie, a small-time pool hustler played by Paul Newman.
"I just had to show'em," Eddie says. "I just had to show those creeps and those punks what the game is like when it's great. When it's really great! Like anything can be great. Anything can be great if a guy knows…. if he knows what he's doing and why and if he can make it come off. Where I'm going, where I'm really going, I feel like…"
With that, the beat drops and Kenneth Masters launches into a bar of poetic, pop culture-infused rhymes that could only have been penned by a rapper who knows what he's doing and has something to prove.
"You Magnificent Bastard" reincarnates the old-school, boom-bap sound of 90s underground hip hop. For Masters, whose career began in Philadelphia's underground hip hop scene over 20 years ago, the album is in some ways a return to his roots. Spin Magazine once called Masters "the best MC in Philly you've never heard of" and Philadelphia Weekly named him "the ultimate torchbearer for Philly's old-school hip hop guard."
There are also contemporary influences from the Pacific Northwest (the album was written and recorded in Portland, OR), references to the social media memes du jour, and the rapper Gums, whose unorthodox lyrics are long, meandering lines of verse featuring multiple internal rhymes that are nothing if not unique. Gums is probably best described by his own words in the song "Save Stuart!":
"Functioning insomniac in action on the back route/ swervin' off the bourbon curvin'/ demons screamin' out the window/ a human crescendo...,"
...and there's more where that came from.
"I think of Ugly Tarantino as a gang of misfits," says Gums. "Three ornery-ass artists doing what we want and think is fly with zero consideration of where we fit in. Love it or hate it. Regard it as repugnant or glorious. This is uninhibited realness. This is ugly."
DJ Lady X, the Portland native whose scratches and cuts punctuate the album's traditional hip hop beats, odd-ball samples, and catchy choruses, honed her craft with the local SkratchpadPDX crew. She brings a funky style to Ugly Tarantino that's influenced by the likes of DJ Killa Jewel and DJ QBert.
"I'm so proud that our record is getting played on radio stations next to legends," says Lady X. "I saw a playlist and it had something like Nas, Ugly Tarantino, Wu, and I flipped."
Ugly Tarantino's "You Magnificent Bastard" can be purchased on vinyl at blackboyawesome.com, undergroundhiphop.com, and at select record stores. Digital downloads are available to purchase or stream on all major digital music platforms including Spotify, Apple, and Google Music.