Happy new year Man people. As a new year’s gift to you all I present the KL Jay Mixtape “Rotação 33″. KL Jay is the DJ for brazil’s biggest hip hop group Racionais MCs, who come from the favelas in the suburbs of São Paulo and whose songs potray quite harrowing scenes from the periferia and are chock full of ctiticism of the social situation in Brazil (all in Portuguese of course). They are into quite epic structures with songs typically stretching for 7-8 minutes and musically they are influenced by gangster rap but also RZA’s productions for WU-Tang Clan with heavily string laden backgrounds. One of the downsides of their popularity is that virtually every rap group that came out of São Paulo after them wanted to sound like them. And this is where the mixtape comes in as it mixes the old school of Braziilian Rap, De Leve, Costa a Costa, with the new school, Maloka S/A, Livia Cruz E as Camaradas, to show where Brazilian hip hop, rap, whatever is today.

My personal experiance of KL Jay was when I put on party with some friends a few years ago and KL Jay djed for us (racionais MCs had played in town the previous night). His Djing was pure old school funk, with him playing old funk, disco and soul tracks ( to a mainly bohemian white crowd) which must have been what they played in the 70s and 80s bailes in the periferias. he even slowed things down for couples to slow dance and was constantly chatting on the microphone between tracks – unbelievably he included “Grease is the word” by Frankie Valli in the set, and it sounded great!

Download Mix.

Pic and link courtesy of the ever-fantastic Trabalho Sujo.

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