Camp Lo's Uptown Saturday Night

2017 | Music & Dance

Two emcees from the Bronx, NY entered the American hip-hop landscape of the mid-1990s with comprehensive insider slang that bewildered as they radiated the look of a bygone era of black culture. Geechie Suede and Sonny Cheeba are the members of Camp Lo. In 1996, they collaborated with producer Ski and a host of other hip-hop recordists to create Uptown Saturday Night, which featured the seminal single "Luchini (a.k.a. This is It)." In the mid-1990s, hip-hop contained an assortment of sounds and imagery, into which Camp Lo inserted a concentrated dose of 1970s Blaxploitation culture. As a tapestry of 1970s black popular culture, this volume details how the fantastic musical world of Uptown Saturday Night was borrowed from the films of that era-particularly the Sidney Poitier film from which the album's name is derived-and positions the album as an essential example of Mark Anthony Neal's post-soul aesthetic. The book is informed by interviews of Camp Lo, album producer Ski, autobiographical accounts by A&R/co-author Will Fulton, and musical and cultural analyses that details the development of the album and how its contents instigated a "re-membering" of black culture.

Patrick Rivers (Author)

William Fulton (Author)