Six Essential Juggaknots Albums(Bandcamp)

A snippet of a Bandcamp write up on the Juggaknots rap group…

“I guess we had an identity that we were—I don’t want to say ‘stubborn,’ but there was definitely a conviction that we wanted to present a certain type of hip-hop,” recalls Breeze (Brewin). At one point, he remembers being asked to add a catchy hook to their song “Clear Blue Skies,” which was a thoughtful and nuanced commentary on mixed-race relationships and intergenerational racism. “For some reason, the stuff that we dug and was popping for us was not out-and-out commercial,” he says. He cites A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum” and the Jungle Brothers’ Straight Out The Jungle as releases that, “weren’t commercial, they were just good, and felt so organically hip-hop.” As Breeze puts it, they entered the scene at a turning point: “This is when they started to make those records that were unabashedly commercial in purpose, and we just had no interest in doing that.”