21 years ago this week I rounded up a bunch of current hip hop and presented the first half of a Solid Steel show that also included mixes from Four Tet and DK. The tracks largely fall into two camps, the serious, ‘backpacker’ kind, pushing things forward like the Anticon crew or the good time party kind with an eye of the 90s like the Quannum and Ugly Duckling camps. Samples are still a thing and the music is all the better for it with a mix of US and European artists. A lot of this has aged very well and I had a great trip down memory lane listening back. After the usual Solid Steel intro there’s a snatch of a US news report about the new phenomenon of hip hop where the newscaster actually raps along with a snatch of Beat Street Breakdown, probably found online.