Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night is one of those albums that I still return to and it still sounds as fresh as it did when it was released. When it came out, I remember the mall kids going totally crazy for it. I was hesitant . . . when you’re seeing a bunch of fourteen year old kids going mad for an album, it’s hard to be like, “I have got to pick up that one,” even when you’re buying music at a tasty discount. But, the more I heard it, the more I knew that it was undeniably great, so I shook off the opinions of my roommates and the mall tweens and came out as a Camp Lo fan. It was very cathartic.

After Uptown came out, though, they got caught up in record label politics and disappeared for five years. And I mean disappeared . . . it was as though they’d never existed. The information I could find was filled with inaccuracies . . . somehow the word got out that they were British, even though they were from the Bronx.

Finally, after five years of waiting, they slipped a little album called Let’s Do It Again under the radar. Reviewers universally called it a “disappointment,” but those reviewers were wrong. It’s every bit the classic that Uptown is, and someday, it is my fondest wish that the universe will recognize the great injustices visited upon my boys Sonny Chiba and Geetchi Suede.

Today, I thought I’d do a search for Camp Lo, just for kicks. And what do I find? Not only do they finally, finally have a web site, (an unnecessarily complex web site), but there’s a whole new album available on iTunes that I never even knew existed. I picked that shit up posthaste, and, OF COURSE, it’s full of one banger after another. On All Music, they don’t even acknowledge this album’s existence. Fuck ‘em. It is a great day to be me. I mean, how can you deny the awesomeness of a group that would say something like this (in response to a question about the disappointing response to Let’s Do It Again):

I had to find out, and DJ’s had told me after the fact, “We want to hear the essence of y’all cats. We want to hear you with the style that you guys came with from the jump.” Me, I just thought they wanted to hear cats rhyme with different flows . . . But the fans who know us, they want the straight Hip Hop. No commercial bullshit, just that straight knock, and that is what we have to continue to hit them with.