One of the greatest hip-hop debuts of the ’90s that roughly 90% of its audience didn’t get to hear until the 2000s, the first full-length from Detroit’s revered Slum Village existed mostly as an oft-copied and bootlegged DIY release/demo before finally getting the deluxe reissue treatment in 2006. By then, rapper/producer Jay Dee had become life-changing MPC maestro J Dilla, but his earliest work with Baatin and T3 was already above and beyond most of what was coming out of the Midwest, with the familiar off-beat rhythms and incandescent bass frequencies of cuts like “This Beat (Keep It On),” “The Look of Love,” and “Forth & Back (Rock Music)” rounding out an already-impressive circa-’96 beat portfolio alongside De La Soul’s “Stakes is High” and A Tribe Called Quest’s “Get a Hold.” (And the James Brown sample adlibs on “I Don’t Know” alone, even in its early-draft minute-long form, are ingenious.) But that’s just one facet of what makes Fan-Tas-Tic such a rarity in its class — the other is the fact that for all its proto-Soulquarian sonics, the lyrics are a lot closer to street-rap anthems than bohemian lyrical poetry. So the end result is an uncanny atmosphere of smooth-gliding shit-talk where the threats to open-hand smack rival crews for wackness (“Players”), the gigolo overtures and unapologetic horniness (“The Look of Love”), and the dick-swinging earned arrogance that fuses them both (“5 Ela Remix”) all have this tension between mellowness and rawness that the rhythmically unpredictable musicality of their flows navigates with ease.

– Nate Patrin