Guts — Hip Hop After All
There is a particular kind of record that can only be made by someone who has spent decades listening before they started producing. Hip Hop After All, the fourth studio album from Parisian DJ and producer Guts, is exactly that kind of record — patient, generous, and assembled with the quiet authority of someone who has nothing to prove and everything to share.
The decision to make a vocal hip-hop album after three instrumental records required a cast equal to the ambition, and Guts assembled one that reads like a love letter to several generations of the genre. Grand Puba, Masta Ace, and Rah Digga represent the golden era — artists whose voices carry the weight of a period when hip-hop was still figuring out what it could be and kept arriving at remarkable answers. Alongside them, Quelle Chris and Denmark Vessey bring a contemporary underground sensibility, while singers Lorine Chia, Cody ChestnuTT, Patrice, and trumpeter Leron Thomas extend the album’s emotional range well beyond rap’s traditional boundaries.
The Guest List as Artistic Statement
This is not a producer vanity project dressed up as a collaboration. Guts steps back consistently and lets his guests breathe, which is the rarest and most valuable quality a beatmaker can possess. The productions serve the performers, not the other way around.
What the Record Sounds Like
The beats on Hip Hop After All are warm in a way that digital production rarely achieves — built from the ground up with the texture of vinyl, the grain of analog, and an instinctive understanding of space. Guts is not chasing trends here. The sonic palette owes more to the boom-bap foundations of early 1990s East Coast hip-hop than to anything that was happening in 2014, but it never sounds nostalgic in the pejorative sense. It sounds considered. There is a difference.
“Last Man Standing” anchors the album’s more anthemic end, while “Open Wide” and “Come Alive,” both featuring Lorine Chia, demonstrate Guts’ ease with melody and his understanding that a great soul hook and a great hip-hop beat are not opposing ideas but natural partners. “Enlighten,” featuring Cody ChestnuTT and Murs, is perhaps the album’s most fully realised track: a piece that manages to feel simultaneously intimate and expansive, the kind of song that improves with every listen.
“Want It Back,” featuring Patrice and the Studio School Voices NYC, takes the record somewhere closer to gospel and reggae-inflected soul — a reminder that for Guts, hip-hop has always been a gateway rather than a ceiling.
Why It Matters
Hip Hop After All arrives at a moment when the conversation about what hip-hop is and who it belongs to has never been louder or more fractured. Guts’ answer is implicit in every track: hip-hop is a practice, a discipline, a form of attention — and when it is done with genuine craft and genuine respect for its roots, it remains one of the most expressive musical languages available to anyone willing to learn it properly.
The Discogs community has given this record a 4.58 average across over 300 ratings, with over 3,000 collectors holding it in their collections. That is not chart success, but it is the more durable kind of recognition — the kind built by people who actually listen.
Final Thoughts
Hip Hop After All is a record that rewards patience and punishes distraction. Put it on in the background and it sounds pleasant. Sit down with it and it reveals itself as something considerably more thoughtful. Guts has made an album that does not demand your attention so much as earn it — which, in the end, is the only approach worth taking.
- Standout tracks: “Enlighten,” “Open Wide,” “Want It Back,” “Come Alive”
- Released: September 8, 2014
- Label: Heavenly Sweetness
- For fans of: J Dilla, Pete Rock, Madlib, Karriem Riggins