'Skilled Trade' by Apollo Brown
A 17-year-old beat tape favorite.
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Over the past decade, I’ve listened to more beat tapes and instrumentals than I can count. In the early days of Micro-Chop I made five 104-beat playlists on Spotify. Due to some of those beats being taken down, those playlists are a bit shorter now.
From 2018 to 2019 I made a 10-beat playlist every day on Spotify or SoundCloud and shared the playlists in the Micro-Chop Twitter feed. I called them The Micro-Chop Daily X. I had several producers like Dibiase guest-curate playlists.
In 2019 I made a 179-beat playlist featuring 179 different producers for Okayplayer’s “Mixtapes Mondays” series that Karas Lamb ran. A lot of the beats on that playlist have been taken down off Spotify but it’s still pretty massive and loaded with heat. For Twitter users, I made a thread of the albums these beats come from titled, “164 Beat Tapes/Instrumental Albums, Instrumental Versions of Rap Albums, and Singles with Instrumentals by 164 Different Producers.” It’s a long thread so you can start at the beginning or the end. (The thread actually contains 166 beat tapes from 166 different producers, the 164 was a typo.)
As much as I like putting together playlists and threads, I also love the process of throwing on an instrumental record and listening front to back, sometimes repeating the same album over, and over, and over again.
There are certain beat tapes I always come back to. Apollo Brown’s Skilled Trade is one of those tapes. The record started as a collection of beats Brown assembled for the offices of his label Mello Music Group. It became such a hit they decided to release it.
I love how Brown plays with the format on different tracks, switching up the style and flow of the music and keeping it interesting for listeners. Early on he employs simple, beautiful loops on “Migrate.”
As the record progresses you’ll find “Hold Me Down,” where he lets the sample ride a little bit on the intro to give the listener a hint of what’s to come.
At times he samples famous, well-known songs, but these sample sources are reimagined in satisfying and creative ways. “We Almost Lost Detroit” and “My Spine” are two such examples.
This album has high reply value and serves as a nice precursor to Brown’s extensive resume of collaborative albums and instrumental projects. It’s only available on Bandcamp so you’ll have to go to their app or website to check it out.
Revisiting my favorite beat tapes/instrumental albums renews my appreciation for past releases and rekindles my desire to continue to explore new ones. I’m grateful I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy so many instrumental hip-hop projects in my lifetime. I can’t wait to listen to more.