Critics’ Cult Classics: Hanif Abdurraqib on Camp Lo’s “Uptown Saturday Night”

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When it dropped successful January of 1997, Camp Lo’s “Uptown Saturday Night” thrilled immoderate listeners and confounded others. In the archetypal successful a bid of Critics astatine Large interrogation episodes devoted to resurfacing beloved cult classics, Vinson Cunningham talks with Hanif Abdurraqib, a contributing writer for The New Yorker and a diehard instrumentality of the Camp Lo project. Abdurraqib describes “Uptown Saturday Night,” which leaned connected Blaxploitation tropes to overgarment a strikingly cinematic representation of New York City, arsenic “essentially a heist film” unto itself. Together, they sermon the album’s lukewarm reception astatine the time, and wherefore its originative attack to storytelling seemed to onshore connected deaf ears. One mentation is that the hip-hop marketplace of the epoch was progressively demanding that musicians prime a lane: underground oregon mainstream, socially conscious oregon unapologetically opulent. “ ‘Uptown Saturday Night’ got mislaid successful that due to the fact that it didn’t truly person a foothold successful either world,” Abdurraqib says. “At a clip erstwhile a batch of these guys with underground roots were bending to the hyper-commercialization of hip-hop, Camp Lo ne'er changed who they were.”

Read, watch, and perceive with the critics:

Camp Lo’s “Uptown Saturday Night”
Fugees’ “The Score”
“Uptown Saturday Night” (1974)
“Midnight Express” (1978)
“The Black Connection” (1974)
Dynasty’s “Adventures successful the Land of Music”
Elliott Wilson’s reappraisal of “Uptown Saturday Night” (The Source)
Slum Village’s “Fan-Tas-Tic (Vol. 1)”
Puff Daddy’s “No Way Out”
Pete Rock and Camp Lo’s “80 Blocks from Tiffany’s”
Camp Lo’s “Black Hollywood”
Jay-Z’s “American Gangster”
Wyclef Jean’s “The Carnival”

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