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.
No comments:
Post a Comment