 Larry Wolff & the Streetbeaters "Honey, have you heard about this breakdancing craze? I'm going to make an album of breakdancing music! That's my ticket!" said Larry Wolff to his wife, who rolled her eyes, by now familiar with her husband's many get-rich quick schemes. OK, that's enough fan fiction devoted to this cheap little knockoff. Obviously, there are no "Streetbeaters," just Larry Wolff and his synths and drum machines. This is about as authentic as Pac Man Fever is funny, which is to say, not at all, but sort of. Oddly, yesterday's cash-in can't help but have an air of authenticity 15 years later, since it dates at the same pace as the real things it's ripping off. There is no hip-hop component whatsoever to this album, just the sort of music you'd expect in a montage sequence from a breakdancing movie, where the kids are canvassing the neighborhood distributing flyers for the big breakdance showdown between the neighborhood center gang and the rich kids who taunt them. (?) It's like a really low-rent version of Herbie Hancock's Perfect Machine, but sounds not so much composed as just programmed. Actually, not even programmed, but more like Wolff is just hitting the presets on his keyboards and letting the machines write the music themselves. There's some pitiful pseudo-scratching, and after two or three songs the irritation factor starts to rise by the second. The cover is ridiculous, too, featuring six dancers (maybe they're the Streetbeaters!) in the process of breakdancing, and the titles of the songs superimposed to make it look like these are all famous breakdancing songs. "Boogie Bod!" "Moonwalkin'!" "Barrio Break!" "Space Case!" Yeah, who can forget those gargantuan chartbusters? They're all pretty much the same song. I hope no one made any money on this, and that Larry Wolff was forced to go back to his first job: ripping off the elderly with bogus real estate deals.
Review by La Fée |