So Big Juss asked me for the liner notes and I spent two months starting drafts and never quite getting it right, constantly reaching for significance and ending up with garbage. In the end, I decided, I can't get too theoretical. So here's the simple truth.

I don't really care where Jus comes from, how he grew up or even what he's about. I just think he makes incredible records. Always thought it. Always will.

It was '95 or maybe early '96 and I got a paid flight to New York to interview some big name or other and I ended up (as all the backpackers did, before they were even backpackers) in Bobbito Garcia's East Village store looking at t-shirts and sneakers and a wall of records. So I bought some vinyl and went home.

You know what I'm going to say. One of them was by Company Flow. I don't think it was their first release. Probably their second (I'm not claiming that I was there at The Birth or nothing). And I took it home and it exploded like a bomb in my front room. Everyone in hip hop talks about originality, but how many 12"s have you dropped the needle on to find out that, shit, this really doesn't sound like anything you've ever heard before? Be honest - not that many.

Well, that's how CoFlow were for me - a hatchet in the forehead, so exciting you feel like you're choking, your oesophogus swelling in disbelief. So I wrote about them and continued to write about them alongside a constantly growing army of supporters who were equally excited by their music, their lyrics, their attitude at a time when our TVs and airwaves were being polluted by a business studies grad replaying huge chunks of The Police and making money out of the death of his best friend. And please, please, try to remember - most of those "underground" MCs making money money now in 2003 spitting fast and angular and clever wouldn't, couldn't, could not exist if it hadn't been to the dual MC attack of CoFlowÅ 

So yes, I will always, for as long as I can listen to music, want to know what the constituent elements of Company Flow are doing in music. We all have our touchstones. El-P, DJ Mr Len and Big Juss. Ah yeah. Big Juss. People were shocked when they heard the "Gaffling Whips" EP, by how radical it was, how far out, how harsh. The popular opinion was that El was the avant gardist, Jus the former spraycan king and b-boy. Which he is. Only he has a different idea about what that means. Yeah, it became a cliché, but like Miles Davis put it, "I have to change. It's like a curse."

What can you say about "Black Mamba Serums"? That it is a "lost" hip hop album that was never really lost? That it's too black, too proud to ever be fully accepted by the people it's aimed at? That it's hip hop taken to its limit? That it's one of the saddest, most personal records the culture has produced? That while it looks to the future, it is also a lament for the hip hop's loss of innocence?

What can you say? Well, for one thing, you can say that "Black Mamba Serums" sounds like nothing on earth. Like no other hip hop album, certainly, though perhaps displaying some common ground with the Black Liberation music of the late sixties. What it shares with much of the best hip hop (and much of the best jazz, blues and soul that came before it) is its conscious attempt to "analyze what was stagnant in the present state of hip hop and try to energize it with creativity, freedom and indivualism." Which shouldn't distract you from the soulfulness, the sheer level of emotion that Juss manages to get into his voice even when spitting endless, snaking multi-syllabic, polyrhythmic lines as if pausing for breath will kill him.

Recorded down it Atlanta after Juss moved there to set up Subverse's southern office, the record was due to come out on September 11th 2001, until Juss pulled it a few weeks before, which is important to him, if not to me. What matters to me is that if you give this record a few listens, sink into it, allow it to build up round you, adjust to it's sudden, vertiginous changes of tempo and rhythm, it's reimagining of the psychogeography of the New York of an eighties graffiti writer living in the warmth of the South fifteen years later, if you adjust to all those things, don't allow yourself to be put off by the fact that the record seems "difficult" and lacking in obvious "head nod" moments, you will slowly come to love this record. Yes, love it, not just admire it. Because, you'll come to see, you're dealing with a stone cold, bona fide classic. And we don't just admire the classics - we love them.