Future Classic: Apollo Brown & Hassan Mackey “Daily Bread”

Lexis — July 20, 2011

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Ascending production star Apollo Brown started making waves in 2009 after winning the Detroit Red Bull Big Tune Championship. The next year he signed to Mello Music Group and released a series of critically acclaimed albums: The Reset, Brown Study (selected by iTunes as one of the Top 10 Hip-Hop Albums of 2010), Gas Mask (with his group The Left, which made DJ Premier’s Top 25 list in 2010), and most recently the instrumental opus Clouds. It’s been a busy couple years. Add into the mix Hassaan Mackey of Rochester, New York, and the new group Daily Bread was formed.

When asked about the lead single “Volume” Hassaan said: “yo man, that was the first beat Apollo played when I walked in his crib in Detroit… this was the first song I wrote to when I got there, and we knew it was the lead joint. It was dumb early in the morning, I had just gotten off the train from New York. Apollo had picked me up and I started writing it at Apollo’s crib and finished it in the studio that night, recorded it, and it was in the pocket. We knew that was the opener!”

Apollo Brown & Hassann Mackey - Volume

Daily Bread will undoubtedly be compared to previous Apollo Brown releases but this one, to put it the way Hassaan says, comes “back with that grit”. The album seems to be ready made for fans of D.I.T.C., Gang Starr, Black Moon, and M.O.P., while maintaining it’s own artistic integrity. It is an album of really very rugged and raw rhymes developed and written at a time when Hassaan was going through a lot of personal issues, dealing with loss, hardship, and basic survival, so the lyrics come across as emotive but not in any way weak – just raw. The beats are straight forward gritty dripping with soul, and bang out the speakers with the best of ’em. Interspersed throughout the album are clips from 70’s blaxploitation films that lend a feel as though the album is from a different era entirely, like it was first made on vinyl 20 years ago, and delivered to us fresh in an era of glitchy, computerized, auto-tuned music that often lacks the punch that Daily Bread delivers.