Touted as “the world’s first video mixtape�, there’s no false advertising here – although the overload of stut-stut-stuttering audio and blatant self promotion overkill from the mixer responsible, DJ Spinbad, may leave even the most forgiving hip-hop fans begging for it to stop. The laws of hip-hop parlance indicate that ‘bad’ means ‘good’, in the case of this bloke we’re not quite sure if it actually applies…

Mercifully, the choice selection of mostly genuine classics of the genre featured here from the ‘80s through ‘90s can also be played as they were meant to be seen and heard. The sound may be just a tad flatter than the remix, but hey – retention of sanity is worth it.

The humour (both intentional and otherwise), the occasionally worrying sense of overblown drama, the often under-credited masterful musical ability and the sheer creativity of what was probably the last truly original AND listenable new form of music to emerge is here to marvel at, courtesy of many of hip-hop’s greatest purveyors. What a shame it only clocks in at under an hour – now what would notable absentees Public Enemy have to say about that?

Track listing…

The 4:3 video presentation is naturally a varied affair, never looking great and regularly looking extremely borderline, with fuzziness and badly saturated colour becoming regular visitors.

The standard audio delivery of the clips is much more desirable, however only available in Dolby Digital 2.0. The remix, presented in DD5.1, is much oomphier, but comes at a major price in having to endure the aforementioned hackneyed DJ rubbish.

As for extras, once you actually manage to dig them out of the mess of unintuitive menus there are some feeble mini-bios on each act with cover art, a rather out-of-it 12 minute short film entitled The Funk Hunt, two minutes of impressive scratching from one New York DJ Boogie Blind and lyric subtitles in an extremely daft graffiti-styled font which renders them almost completely indecipherable. Or perhaps I'm just not 'street' enough?

A visual mixtape is an interesting idea, however it just doesn’t – and couldn’t – come off as well as a traditional music-only mix. Some good clips do feature, however ultimately this is more of a curio than a platter that matters.