The Sparks Foundation, along with Mass Appeal, is doing the Lord’s work. They realized a while ago that Jim Johnston’s WWE themes — along with Jimmy Hart and whoever made WCW’s themes — need to be sampled. A lot. Inspired by the success of their first release, Forever Madness, a very dope tribute to the Macho King himself, Randy Savage, Emilio Sparks and John Sparkz are ready to attack the ropes with Parts Unknown. And yes, that’s the Ultimate Warrior on the cover as an homage to Nirvana’s In Utero.
The EP is only seven tracks, but where else can you hear Bodega Bamz rap over the Razor Ramon theme? The Sparks Foundation — that’s Sparks, not Hart — had this to say to Mass Appeal:
“When we first started this series, we wanted to combine two of our favorite worlds from our childhood till now, rap and wrestling. We were also inspired by Smoke DZA’s Ringside Mixtape series, so we dropped Forever Madness, and got a crazy amount of love from rap and wrestling fans everywhere. Not too long after that, even more rappers and wrestlers either loved the project or wanted to be on it. It was a no-brainer to do a sequel, this time honoring the late great Ultimate Warrior. So, we connected with some of our music pals like Trae, Twelvyy, Project Pat, Hatty Maines, and some our our favorite producers including Harry Fraud, Audible Doctor, Mike Cash and more. We hit up Big E from the current WWE Tag Champs, The New Day to help us curate the EP, and today we’re proud to finally unveil it. Hope you enjoy Parts Unknown.”
Enjoy it you shall. One of the best things about this tape is the inclusion of cats who actually like wrestling. They know the game inside out, they understand why they’re rapping over Sting’s theme or Jake “the Snake” Roberts’ theme and love every second of it. It’s just a wonder that it took hip-hop producers this long to do what WWE did 16 years ago with their Aggression album, which is totally worth your time.
Watch wrestling and listen to hip-hop. If it’s cool enough for Project Pat, it’s cool enough for you.
(Via Mass Appeal)
