Good Enough

This is a really complex album. And not so for the usual reasons, like it deals with morality in ambiguous and dangerous situations, or that it deals with Zen-Motorcycle-Maintenance philosophy. It’s complex because the form, delivery, and intended audience are completely foreign to me.

It sounds like the magical-mystical-negro lecturing a pants-sagging gang of bangers on how to grow up and achieve with half his speech slurred and the other half in a jive-lingo so alien I need subtitles.

A few things are going on here. First, the positive message. The content of the album is invariably positive. ‘Beautiful Skin’ promotes socially conservative dress for women even if it takes sexual promiscuity for granted. ‘Inshallah’ and a series of snippets from other work on the album contrast the rigors of daily life with the evangelical ecstasy. ‘Gutta Butta’ starts off with an insert that demands people take care of their community, because he’s tired of seeing trash everywhere. So far so good.

But the verbiage is all off. The opening track, ‘The Experience’, drops the n-bomb like, one hundred and seventy four times* to make the point that the true enemy of the black community is itself. In the insert before ‘Gutta Butta’ one member rails against the trashy appearance of the community, and he specifically calls out ‘ya’ll folks comin’ up outta the store takin ya ‘lil candy out, throwin ya ‘lil paper on the ground, man, is fuckin up the hood’. I still have no idea what one track title ‘Greeny Green’ relates to, and context clues from the song don’t help. The rest of the tracks paint the nobility not necessarily of escaping the ghetto, but instead living a virtuous life within the system. As a white male, I’ve no connection to this.

Which would be excusable if it was nevertheless really fun to listen to. And it is. Parts of it, at least. Cee-Lo is an amazing performer. His choruses on ‘Inshallah’ and ‘Beautiful Skin’ are like visions of beatitude. His flows on ‘I refuse limitation’ and ‘Ghetto-Ology’ are inspired. His voice is like an old man with a wide grin and emphyszmatic throat and all the rhythm of a Birmingham protest. Unfortunately, there are three other members of Goodie Mob.

One of them, Khujo, sucks. As in, worse than the guys that are in the clan but don’t get mentioned on Wu-tang albums. It’s mostly his punctuation. He throws pauses for emphasis after inconsequential details and rush through the end of important ideas and into new ones without any momentary stop for clarity. And a bunch of his shit doesn’t rhyme, and when it does it sounds accidental. The net effect is like if you took a paragraph from a book, and then read it to a beat, but tried to make it sound gangster. Three years ago a friend of mine literally did this. It sounded better.

T-mo and Big Gipp, the two remaining members, are average. Its thug rap, but of the innocuous kind that seems to drone more than delight.

I rate this album ‘A Lesson Before Dying’. Because there ain’t but three well known rap crews to come out of Atlanta, and Goodie Mob is one of them, this CD is something any rap listener should listen to at some point. But it deals with a perspective and subject matter that’s so different from what I’ve seen and done and experienced that it feels like whoever made the album didn’t want me to listen to it. The appeal is anti-universal.

*Not really 174 times.

Undesposable Temperment

This is a really good, well-crafted, album.

To describe Disposable Arts in one word, is Lucid. With two, Piercing. Masta Ace’s work isn’t culled from various freestyle sessions with the homies, compiled in the studio by couplet and quatrain, and then sold like it’s supposed to matter. It’s handcrafted. The songs are written, which allows Ace to use a wider range of literary techniques. ‘Unfriendly Game’ uses an extended metaphor to compare ‘the game’ of hustling and running the streets to an actual sporting event, complete with crowds, bleachers, refs and penalty boxes. ‘Alphabet Soup’ slurs words to create an unpredictable pattern when letters are substituted for numbers (he gets all the way to ‘w’). The songs stay on topic. ‘No Regrets’ asks and answers if the rewards of rap are worth the sacrifice. ‘Take a Walk’ describes ghetto living to a cursory walker down the street, set to a haunting melody and slow beat.

Stylistically there isn’t a lot of internal rhyme, which makes the lyricism on the album not particularly flashy or catchy. This doesn’t hurt, but instead prevents the delivery from obfuscating the albums message. It’s fun to listen to, but not THAT fun to listen to, so the presentation doesn’t prevent the communication of the ideas behind the songs. The style is bland intentionally, using rhyming couplets to advance the plot of each song, and each song as a thread in the woven tapestry that is the album.

Disposable Arts follows the story of an inmate released from jail who proceeds to enroll at a fictional hip-hop college in order to leave behind the danger of everyday life in Brownsville, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. The story is advanced through inserts interspersed between songs that thematically tie into the inserts, weaving a cohesive if not strictly chronological narrative with consistent mood, setting, and characters.

The message is mundane. It says ‘this is the ghetto. It’s bad. Don’t do this.’ The hero of the narrative leaves behind the danger and makes something of himself, where all the other characters fall into prison, death, or single-parenthood. It’s not a revolutionary idea, but is undertaken with honesty and refreshing in its clarity.

On a one to ten scale, I award this ‘album you want your child to grow to be like’. It’s deep, thoughtful, descriptive, and entertaining. It is intelligent and unapologetic. It is reverent and soulful and tragic and triumphant, and as a result it will alienate both backpackers and thugs because it is neither inventive nor simple, but walks a middle path of simply being very good work.

Everything is Helter Skelter!

D.I.R.T., from Heltah Skeltah, isn’t my usual fare. Two New York cats from a much larger rap supergroup, Ruck and Rock are like a lesser known, but more polished, Redman and Methodman. Their theme is gangster, their delivery is constant, heavy, and hard-hitting, their imagery is more fun, but their talent, though doubtless honed through a harrowing series of battles and contests, is more at home in show speakers and subway earphones than it is in the cerebral meditations of a train-bombing writer whose boombox fuels his hands, mind and soul.

Which is like saying it’s not back-pack friendly, like that means anything to anyone. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, just that there should be.

D.I.R.T. has energy. Its opening single, ‘Heltah Skeltah’ pushes the listener into the passenger seat of a white bronco deliriously escaping from cops in Twisted Metal hijacks that lasts the album long. It’s fun to listen to, in part because the work is verses are frequent and inventive, in part because the choruses are small and far between, and in part because Ruck and Rock have melodious voices they interchange between to keep the rhythms of their work new and exciting.

‘Melodious’ is a shit word to describe it. Ruck has a hoarse rasp, like someone gave the Lance Armstrong treatment to one of his testicles and lung and he never fully recovered. Rock’s voice is so deep and robust it sounds like he was the doctor who engineered Ruck’s treatment so he’d have some material for the black-op docs in Chiba to work with, dilating his scrotum walls to fit the third testicle. The man’s voice is so good it made MY panties drop to the floor, and I don’t even wear them anymore.

This is good show music. The words are tight and the imagery is hypnotic and smooth, and there’s never a dull moment. The words are too engaging for club music, but not articulate enough for these guys to be fully welcomed into the hipster-backpack-rap scene, so they occupy rap’s landscape as mercenaries in the never-ending battle between the haves and the I’m-so-underground-I’m-in-China crowd.

That said, they get in some great punchlines. Among my favorites:

‘My gun pop niggas, one shot nigga/I run out of shells, then straight Ong Bak niggas…’
‘You[‘re] so sub-par you sub-leasing. Subway sandwich eatin, suckah type, suckin your teeth…’
‘Unleash the piece, and spank you boy Bong, release the Beast, I'm Hank Mccoy/ Used to take 'x man', and show no hoes love, now I let the skit blam at them so called thugs’

Exciting parts of quotes in bold.

On a one-to-ten scale, I award D.I.R.T. a Cadbury Egg: a great diversion, but ultimately unfilling. If Hip-Hop isn’t a religion, D.I.R.T. is pretty much at the top of the game of what rap is supposed to be. The cascading interplay between the voices and quatrains of the two partners is rhythmically complex, without being bogged down by having actual ideas that can be difficult to understand. At the same time, while its great fun, if you expect every rapper that doesn’t get radio play to have a ‘message’ to raise your ‘consciousness’, prepare to be disappointed. Severely disappointed. Like, ‘Daddy didn’t come home on 9/11’ disappointed, because no matter how hard you look, Heltah Skeltah is only a lyrically enchanting thug-rap group.

Delicate, Polite Bootprints

There’s something wrong with whatever system I use to analyze the music I’m listening to. My notes for the first run-through of Z-Ro’s Z-Ro vs. The World – invariably my most honest criticism- wrote the work off as thug-rap so one-dimensional it hadn’t yet recognized misogyny and drug-dealing as topics of merit. Upon subsequent listenings, my harsh sentiment had softened to the point where I used the CD as a pick-me-up on my way home from a poor job- interview.

Which leads me to suspect that I don’t give a lot of these rappers anywhere near the shit they deserve for putting out horrible albums. ‘Cuz… some of these albums are songs only a mother could love. A mother that raised a thug like Z-Ro.

Z-Ro’s work is uncompromising and bleak. Its favorite (almost exclusive) topics are crime, poverty, and being a gangster; camaraderie, violence, and competition. He does it with a humorless anger, taking breaks only to commiserate on the empty wonders of well-deserved success. At the time of the publishing of the album, he was the same age I am now.

Z-Ro’s work is different from others in the Houston area, specifically those in the SUC (Screwed Up Click, the remnants of a rag-tag band of fans of DJ Screw). Paul-Wall almost never mentions violence, preferring to spend his time discussing the merits of working hard in order to make a lot of money. Chamillionaire’s favorite topic is how much better of an MC he is than everyone else and how successful he’s been selling his records. Scarface is probably most similar in vein to Z-Ro, but due to his age and veteran status has a wider range, including ideas of psychosis and family, and takes breaks from shouting out harsh threats to hang out with 2Low and let him say things no 13 year old should say. Z-Ro is straight gangster-shit. And while the lazer-like focus leads to a more authentic sound, it also leads to burnout with a quickness. Well, that and the fact that it's hard to listen to.

Apparently, somewhere along the way whoever was mixing the CD decided it was a good idea to down the volume on the instrumentals to a point where you can’t hear them if there’s significant background noise. I think they did this because they realized they were actually using canned sound-effects and non-ironic-synthed-attempts-at-instruments instead of the real thing, and so decided to cleverly disguise their mockery of the ancient art of DJing by convincing an unwitting public that rappers can sing too. Thus, the repeated use of sung hooks and shitty instrumentals.

‘Dirty 3rd’ has Houston’s nigh-patented drum-track beat, with a simple scale synth and a couple suspensenoises I recognized from GoldenEye 64 thrown on the track for variety. ‘Hustling Is All I Can Do’ has what has to be an 8-bit game-system bassoon with a couple of legitimate piano chords thrown in for good measure. ‘Gonna Get Easier’ takes a slower approach to the beat, but still ends up with an early-90’s Dre-like keyboard effect overlaid with a major chord progression. It’s not so much that they sound the same, so much as the tracks sound… simple. This is truly tragic, as Z-Ro’s style, while not being A-quality work, still makes the B-range by sheer virtue of its grit, tenacity, and willingness to vary rate and rhythm.

Z’Ro Sounds gangster. This is really important, because there actually are a lot of rappers out there who can’t quite make the gangster-sound believable (Soulja boy, Akon, Cypress Hill… Snoop Dogg), and it’s usually because their voices lack the appropriate bass quality and aggressive timber. Z-Ro has those, along with the ability to vary his speed, and it makes for a solid performance. He can also sing, and by that I mean he can hit notes on the note, and not slide around or screw up the scale. His singing voice sucks though (see paragraph above as to why this matters). Humorously, the same inflexibility that makes him a good rapper makes him a poor singer. Poor guy.

On my scale from Fresh to SuperCockSucker, I give this album a rating of ‘the fat bitch at the club’. It’s not my first choice, due to its one-dimensionality and the fact that I can’t get really into it, but if it’s the only CD left in the world, yeah, there ain’t nothing wrong with it. Besides, it’s good to curl up to, and if I wake up the next morning it better be making me some damn eggs and bacon or I’m kicking it out of my iPod so fast I’ll leave bootprints on its ass.

Make sure to join me next week as I re-enter the slog of the early 90's with Scarface's 'Mr. Scarface Is Back', if for no other reason than to finally hear the third song in the saga of Mr. Scarface's self-titled tracks.

GIRL THIS DICK IS SO CLEAN…

…You could boil it in some collard greens.” Is probably one of the more hilarious one-liners off Devin the Dude’s 2007 album Waiting to Inhale. The entire album is filled with them. ‘Matter fact, its gonna be five-hundred for some dick” and “I’d sweep you off yo feet with a box of chocolates but watch it, because it’s really balled up hog-shit”. Honorable mention goes to a lot of quotables on the CD, but nothing really gets vegan chicks so skinny their bikini clad beach-bodies are publically mocked for actually being young boys having lost a dare like referring to your penis being boiled with some veggies that are typically fried afterwards. I mean, when I think about that, it doesn’t even make sense. And that’s really the beauty of it.

Devin the Dude apparently smokes a lot of weed. And when I say a lot of weed, I mean ‘…I bought a whole quarter pound, but that was just today and now I’m down to a dime[bag]’. Most of his lyrics, and all of his songs*, revolve around getting high, or getting laid. Ordinarily, this is a combination I would turn my nose up at like a sexy redheaded Tolnedran princess, but the fact is that Devin’s got the attitude and the self-consciousnessless to make it work for him. The album is really funny.

It is a tribute to his ability to function in society that its humor does not require the listener to be blazed while listening in order to feel like he's in on the jest. Much of it actually revolves around irony. In ‘Just Because’, he outlines a series of awkward ways to kill a woman set to a Barry-Manilow-esque soundtrack, complete with jazz saxophone and airy-keyboard. In ‘She Useta Be’, he describes meeting this super hot chick from high school “150 lbs and 10 years later”… and he still hits that “Because of how she used to look, you know?” ‘She Want That Money’ starts out with him deciding to live within his means AND get laid by propositioning a prostitute… and not paying her.

There’s some good flow, but it’d be a mistake to argue that Devin the Dude shows amazing technical ability or style. He’s not monotonous or tiresome by any means, it’s just that his hooks and lines aren’t his draw; he neither dazzles with dexterity nor baffles with bullshit. Instead, the poetry is really just a canvas for his humor, and his voice.

He sounds Katt Williams had a baby with Mitch Hedberg, midwifed by Dr. Dre and birthed from the womb of none other than Mary Jane herself.

And it's that thin, weak and emasculated voice that angles that extra notion of ‘did he just say…’ into his lyrics to make them funny. It sounds shy and introverted. And then you realize he just inferred he choked a bitch to death with his cock. And not in the ninja way, either.

That said, his instrumentals leave me with the suspicion that, while he spent some time in the studio setting off smoke alarms and then not being able to find them to turn their obnoxious noise off, he spent the rest of the time playing haki-sak with some white kids at a Dave Matthews tribute circle-jerk and accidentally mated one of their acoustic guitars with his sampler-board. A quarter of the beats on this CD have this strangely soothing guitar on them, which leads me to believe that guitar trait is recessive and the sampler was a carrier** for the gene. The rest of the instrumentals are cool though. ‘She Want That Money’ features some electric guitar modding that is as ska as it is minimalistic; “She Useta Be” has this loose saxophone segment that perfectly complements the husky voice of the woman they got to sing the fat bitch's segment; ‘Somebody Elses Wife’ has a Nile-smooth-jazz beat and the only tasteful, non-ironic, actually-useful, seriously-improving-the-song, what-am-i-saying-dear-heaven-strike-me-down-now use of autotune ever.

Seriously. There’s autotune, and it doesn’t suck. I don’t know what to make of it. It’s reserved for choruses and other special moments on the CD like bar mitzvahs and the birthing of first-born sons, but when it does show up, it benefits the work by adding a hypnotic, otherworldly feel to it.

You know what did suck though? ‘Lil Girl Gone’. It’s a song about a pre-pubescent girl running away from home and growing up on the streets in poverty and despair. To say that it clashes with the rest of the album is to imply the asteroid that smashed tons of soot into the earth’s atmosphere 65 million years ago and killed off all the dinosaurs Jesus himself didn’t personally ride into Noah’s ark was in fact a mere ‘boink’ on the earth's crust with a loose bit of space debris. As in: yeah, and then some.

It makes you wonder if someone put him up to this, because Devin only sings the refrain, and I have difficulty believing he didn’t realize it’s totally out of place with the ‘it’s just jokes’ mode of the rest of the album. My honest opinion was that they got to the end of the album and were like ‘damn, we didn’t say nuthin that wasn’t deeper than the papers we usin to roll this blunt with. What should we do?’ and they combined the elements of a country-song to play the heart-strings of the hip-hop community into thinking Devin and crew could reflect on things and think… and feel feelings and shit.

I’m not buying it.

On a one to ten scale, I give this Space Invaders. You know, the video game? It’s fun and enjoyable, but more or less impossible to take seriously. It blunts the sadness when you’re feeling down, it gives you something to laugh at when you’re already smiling, you can jam out with it for hours (by the end of the album, you’ve forgotten what the beginning felt like), and the high score is over 9000 by this point. Expect light-hearted fun, mild to moderate chauvinism, little substance and great levels of substance abuse.

But not nearly as much substance abuse as I'm going to have to perform in order to get through next weeks review: Z-ro's Z-ro vs. The World. Tune in next Friday for more of your weekly hip-hop dose of dope, hope, toasts and mind-numbing run-on sentences.


*See paragraph 9, which starts ‘You know what did suck though…”
**Punnett square

Hey Bro! Nice Hair!

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SwisherSweets + SwishaHouse = The Smackdown

Paul Wall’s The People’s Champ is a nigh twenty-track virtuoso of the full-blown glory of Houston Rap. Released in ’05, it features many of the biggest names in the southern scene, from Bun B to Three Six Mafia to T.I. It’s low on message, low on content, high on materialism, and really fun to listen to. The tracks are slow, the Houston Rep is high, and the overall effect makes you want to drive through traffic with a couple twelves in your trunk, ten layers of candy-paint on your oversized truck and let the rest of the city know just how long its been since Pimp C was found dead.

This might not be the CD that put The South on the map, but it was the CD that put The South on the map for me. Which was a surprise for me, because I was expecting it to be a chore. Coming from a couple of weeks of Geto Boys, I figured all Houston rap artists would make me break out my thesaurus to look up new and interesting ways of saying ‘It’s good… if you’re into that sort of thing’. But The Peoples Champ is both distinctly Houston and distinctly awesome, as much as Mai’s, Frenchy’s, or Miller Outdoor Theatre.

Houston production revolves around the chopped/screwed style, pioneered by the late DJ Screw, which involves dropping the pitch down into vocal numbness and blatantly repeating specific lines/words/phrases on the vocal track while letting the beat continue unabated. The use of this technique on Paul Wall’s album is tasteful, and adds to the production value without interfering with the vocalistic integrity of the work, which was the point in Screw’s actual work.

Starting with ‘They don’t know’, The People’s Champ references singularly Houston phenomenon, from Timmy Chan’s chicken wings, to candy painted cars, drank/syrup, and the 59 freeway. This technique is really simple, but its importance can’t be overlooked; while major-label artists have a fan base so wide they’re above throwing out bones to the local crew, southern artists, particularly Houston, get little love on the national stage, and so are forced to find other ways, such as this, to expand their market. The local populism fuels the rappers popularity until they’re doing mixtapes with artists in other districts. It’s like networking, for professionals.

That said, when I say this CD is low on content, I mean… holy fuck. There’s really no thematic play, aside from ‘I have a car/it looks cool/I live in Houston/DJ Screw.’ I swear to God, the phrase ‘candy paint’ appears on this album 44 times. ‘Sippin drank’ shows up 52. The CD’s message is about as deep as the leather interior in a classic Cadillac. Which is absolutely perfect.

It’s easy to want to hate the narrowness of the Wall’s topics. Life is more than getting paper, getting laid, candy paint, and sippin’ drank. And yet, to be able to put out a CD that entirely revolves around that, with an hour of music, and have it sound good is a feat that requires nothing short of muse-like inspiration and bacchanal endurance.

If there is a more sublime theme, it slips in by accident, and it’s the protestant work-ethic that drives urban youth to hard work. There’s the assumption throughout the scene (as in, not just Mr. Wall) that in order to obtain success, there has to be work involved; success is neither given by God, nor delivered by luck. This mirrors real life, in the fact that most rappers start out as entrepreneurs and salesmen, develop contacts with the scene, promotional materials, and make numerous, numerous attempts to sell and sell and sell before finally succeeding. I see it as proof that they understand the numbers game.Its one of those lessons life teaches you, that they apparently learned early enough to become successful. Well done, guys.

On my scale of awesome, I grant The People’s Champ a ranking of The People’s Eyebrow. It towers above the rest of the audio of the Houston scene, is an important record for one of the most electrifying acts in rap entertainment today, while simultaneously doing and saying nothing of substance. Paul Wall deserves to be sittin’ sideways while driving slow, because they don’t know.