Maybe it's the sample, a mercurial sped-up marimba melody from a Billy Cobham jazz-fusion song. Or maybe it's the familiar boom-bap beat, or the warm, wistful bassline, or the fact that this prophetic ...

On the face of it, it’s one of hip-hop history’s most perplexing mysteries – if, admittedly, perhaps not the most pressing. How come the Souls of Mischief’s truly excellent debut didn’t turn the band ...

Los Angeles was the molten-hot core of hip-hip in the early ’90s, and no year was more heated than 1993. The feud between Dr. Dre and Eazy-E had bubbled over, leading to the eye-for-an-eye releases of ...

In the early 1990s the four members of East Oakland’s “fantastic four” (Tajai, Phesto, Opio, and A-Plus), the Souls of Mischief, were flying high. Signed to Jive Records and working on their first ...