After writing a bit about Wordsound here (and enjoying their skunked out dubby hip hop for years) I finally got around to watching the label’s feature film Crooked last night.

Crooked was shot, written and produced on an ultra low budget by Wordsound’s guru and Chief Executive Skiz and released in 2002 on DVD. The storyline is an (almost?) fictional account of an idealistic hip hop head starting a label in NYC with a deranged but massively talented rapper and producer by the name of Sensational. Who is played by deranged but massively talented rapper and producer Sensational.

A whole downpouring torrent of Wordsound ‘heads’ make guest appearances including Anti Pop Consortium and Ras Kush, who plays a wise rasta dishing out wisdom and vinyl at legendary NY store Jammyland (which eerily seems to be in a twilight zone “between locations” dilemma as I write this).

The film suffers from, and is buoyed up by, all the usual limitations of low budget films – the plot is shaky, some of the camerawork and sound is shakier, the dialogue made my better half cringe in places and she wasn’t even in the same room. But despite all this it’s good to see somebody having a go at something ambitious – trying to put their vision out there in different ways without pandering to expectations, coolness or whatever.

The portrayal of dedicated people getting by, and venal record label personnel and drug dealers is pretty effective and Sensational lives up to his name I think. Plus there is a slightly noirish atmosphere to all the NYC shots which I like.

The first mix I ever did kicked off with Spectre vs Scotty Hard’s The Joust from Wordsound’s second “Crooklyn Dub Consortium” compilation. So I was especially pleased to see him in the film, playing a cop. Scotty is aka Scott Harding, a founder member of New Kingdom – a point of regroupment in the early nineties for people who liked their hop to be hip, but also fucked up and experimental. He seems to be pretty at home in the studio – his discography is pretty impressive.

Check this out, for example:

During all this I was reminded that Scotty had fallen on hard times recently, a car crash in February leaving him paralysed. His friends are rallying round and maybe people reading this could as well if they like his stuff:

SCOTTY HARD INFO

As some of you may or may not know, Scott Harding (a/k/a Scotty Hard) was in a bad accident this past February. The road to recovery is long and hard and as has been noted before, “Legal resolution of insurance settlements will take a long time, and there is no way to know what the long term financial picture will look like. In the meantime there is rent due, mixing console payments to be made, a myriad of bills to pay to keep creditors at bay etc, not to mention medical and legal bills that will start to come in.”

If you wish to make a donation or just to keep abreast of the various benefits that are going on for Scott, please go to http://www.ScottyHardTrust.com

Thank you for your support.

If you ever downloaded his stuff or liked that mix I did, I think now would be a good time to do the right thing.