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.