Day 74: Dabrye – Two/Three

A lot of hip-hop lacks sorely in musicality where the beats are concerned. It’s a genre with conflicting goals: it’s a form based around lyricism, at this point, but it got its start from MCs working a crowd up over a crate full of looping soul records. The MC was working in service of the beats, trying to make sure people were having a good time. Over time, the words took over, and hip-hop is certainly better for it. But where does that leave the producer? The DJ? The talented artist behind the boards who gives those rappers’ words legs so’s they can get to stepping?

A producer wants to put out a record of his music, he needs people to rap over it. Sure, some can get away with discs of instrumentals, but who is that for? Someone on the level of J Dilla can (posthumously) put out an album of 45-second snippets of beats and tunes made for people, and you can play “Oh, I recognize that beat, that’s from that Ghostface song” — cool. But it’s still that Ghostface song. Any of the most intense, musical hip-hop I’ve ever heard (Cannibal Ox’s Cold Vein for example) is most memorable for the words, even when the production is something from another world and would be entertaining enough on its own.

Why is that? Rappers and producers need each other. Neither can succeed without the other. Look at Kanye — where would he be without H to the Izzo? Even when he had a book full of good rhymes, he was laughed away from a microphone time and time again by people who would benefit from him being on the decks.

Where does this leave the creatively restless producer who isn’t inclined towards doing dance-hall music like house, techno — or whatever sub-genre thereof is hot at the moment — and who doesn’t want to rap? There are the oddballs like El-P who can rap just well enough to put out great albums on their own, but are really much better off at the computer (producing stuff like Cold Vein). One could go the Dr. Dre route and get rich enough to hire people like Jay-Z to write your rhymes. Or one could just put out crazy, cerebral, progressive electronic tracks and make friends with the rappers who smoke the most pot.

That appears to be Dabrye’s strategy. Dabrye is one of the many noms de plume of Detroit-based producer Tadd Mullinix (sic). Mullinix’s first couple of releases were (apparently) IDM, glitchy narcotized dance music, and I guess then he turned on to the idea of producing for rap music. On this disc, he goes for every boundary possible, musically: the whole thing is turgid with sound, frequently finding seven copies of the same hi-hat rattling around over a sharp saw-wave synth or twelve. The prevailing mood is not as sinister as most maximalist electro producers (the aforementioned El-P) but rather more positive, more confrontational than foreboding, and ever danceable.

The only problem comes in the rappers involved. Most of them just aren’t that good, and the production fights them constantly. Most of the mealy-mouthed rappers get lost in the mess of sound and can’t beat it. It’s easy to get the impression that the rappers are taking a backseat to the producer, which maybe they are. It is his album, sure. But it just ends up sounding messy. And it doesn’t have to be that way. On the strongest track — “Game Over” — you get really good verses by Jay Dilla and Phat Kat, and the production doesn’t try to talk over them. It’s possibly his best beat, with a bum leg limp to the rhythm, and the choruses are the clinchers. In the choruses he lays this droning organ note behind them that sounds way too loud, like it is trying to drown them out, but it’s stuffed off to the side, and doesn’t change or attract attention, really, so it actually just highlights the lyricists brilliantly, making their words sound much more powerful when they’re not actually saying all that much. It’s on that track that Dabrye shows he knows what he’s doing, and it’s unfortunate that he doesn’t carry that tendency over the rest of the album.

Sure, it’s all mostly pretty entertaining, and the instrumental tracks are killer, too. Likewise, the other vocal tracks aren’t all that bad, it’s just that you have to tune out the rappers to enjoy them properly. Dabrye needs to make a decision: Whether he wants people to be listening to him, or listening to the rappers. He tries to have both far more often than he should.

Day 72: Blackalicious – Blazing Arrow

My favorite days leave me baffled as to why I hadn’t heard the day’s album before. This was one of them.

I’ve heard Gift of Gab spoken of as some sort of master rapper, but I can’t recall ever hearing anything of his before. Blackalicious perfectly represent what I love about hip-hop, though. It’s rare that a hip-hop album comes along where it’s hard to decide whether the music or the lyrics are better, but this is one such album. The best part, though, is that although both aspects are incredibly strong, they don’t jockey for supremacy — they work together in harmony.

Gift of Gab has a virtuosic lyrical talent and sounds like three people rapping simultaneously at times, but has such articulate delivery and concise word usage that he still comes across clear, and you don’t need to feed his lines through a translator or focus intently to understand what words he is using (here’s looking at R.A. The Rugged Man). He weaves his words into inspirational, thoughtful, and most importantly honest reflections that hit really, really hard at times. I can’t tell it any better than he can, and I recommend you listen to “Nowhere Fast“, the track that has stuck with me and demanded incessant replay, where he delivers a heart-felt plea to yesterday, and all the potential he believed existed at the time, to return, finding himself then in the present, swearing off yesterday and promising to do better tomorrow, until at the end of the song he finds tomorrow gone to yet another yesterday. It’s a hell of a song if only because at over 6 minutes long it feels brief — you feel as if you’re going through several songs in a row, but it keeps a cohesive idea from start to finish. If you look at the long-form hip-hop from, say, Kanye West, you’ll see that’s hard to do properly.

That leads to the most impressive part of this album. It’s the maximum CD length (74 minutes) and feels short. Each song does something different, and finds some new way to entertain, whether it’s merely kevlar-woven rhymes or full-band jazz scale run exercises, and the beats keep the experience rolling like it’s nothing. Blackalicious throw a party on this disc, and simultaneously manage to satisfy every possible taste in hip-hop: meticulously produced beats that amplify rather than leech the soul they sample and would sound good hissing from the worst soundsystem ever; lapidary rhymes; guest spots that don’t for one second detract or distract from the message of the whole album, which is put in the forefront on “Purest Love“:

The greatest expression is love, happiness, and laughter
See life is a book and this song is just another chapter
I’ll stay down to earth and real if you speak I’ll speak back
I’m not a preacher or a scholar, I’m merely just a rapper

I probably don’t fit in to the current state of –
– what you consider that to be
So you ask how can I rap
If I ain’t thugged out, pimpin’, flossin’ my ice, packin a gat?

Man if this is what I got, I want dough I can’t lie
But never sell my soul ‘n front inside mainstream’s eyes
The purest love is how I’m driven, sent, and reach for my goals
If nothing else I’ll leave the world some songs that speak from the soul

A masterful album that deserves to be heard front to back, in and out, and studied and cherished, but it’ll be cool if you just wanna crank it at the beach.

Day 33: W.C. – The Shadiest One

I’ve missed rap music so much. It’s been roughly half of my daily music intake for quite a few years, now. It’s probably been the genre I’ve missed the most. I find myself reciting Nas verses when I’m at work, and really miss hip-hop beats. I miss the movement it inspires in my body, and bobbing my head to it. I miss picking apart the words. I miss the stories.

This album is West Side to a T. Opener “Hog” put a huge-ass smile on my face almost instantly. The beats are classic, sounding like any number of Coolio or Dre or Snoop Dogg tracks from the 90s. Lots of those cheesy keyboard melodies, bone-dry handclaps, and huge woozy distorted basslines. The tunes here are designed to rattle the shit out of your trunk. W.C.’s rapping stands strong on its own, sounding lively over the stoned beats. He has a frenetic flow, settling deeply into the pocket and throwing out surprising triplet-time word flourishes, dropping some really decent wordplay (“No gimmicks, just a crew of driveby shooters / Coupe de Ville swoopers, looters and Stax loopers“). The guest stars (E-40, 2 Short) all pull out pretty fierce verses, and W.C. gets in a couple of good story songs, like the love song “Call it What You Want” (which probably has the best beat on the album — check that electronic piano) about this bitch he used to fuck with who was “damn near a wife to [him].” Suddenly he starts to think she’s cheating on him and he loses his mind, starts stalking her everywhere, and eventually busts in on her at a strange house, guns drawn, only to find his bitch freakin’ with another woman in her water bed. It ends with the inspirational couplets, “If you trust we/Then us three could be livin’ in harmony/I get’s to thinkin bout the pussy and the riches/Fuck it, I guess I got two down bitches“.

I feel conflicted about liking rap. I don’t even front, like most hipsters, about “only liking conscious/underground hip-hop.” Give me some socially corrosive gangster rap and a gun to hold while I listen to it. I’m fuckin’ all about it. I will break my fuckin’ neck getting down to it and learn the words and say them like the words coming out of my mouth make sense. But it never takes long for reality to set in.

It’s hard to tell just how much W.C. is joking or whatever you want to call it when he raps “It’s too many weak niggas with too much talkin’/not enough sidewalk chalkin’“. Even if he is joking, it’s hard to appreciate. When I was a kid, my mom and I spent a little while in a womens’ shelter just outside of Gary, Indiana. It was the first time I could remember meeting black people. Anyway, Gary is a ghetto, and gang-infested, and most of the women in the shelter had lost kids to gang bangin’. They used to sit around the TV room and talk about their kids, and talking about the sons who died to trifling street shit, and crying the most agonized tears I can remember witnessing. And this memory has stuck with me ever since. When I hear people talking about killing other people in rap music, there’s a part of me that can say “That’s not real,” but there’s an equal-sized part of me that shakes its head and says “For someone it is.”

Even once I stopped thinking rap was all terrible, as I got into it, and as I learned how much I could identify with the stories of growing up in poverty and rising from it, it just made it harder and harder to appreciate proper gangster rap. I can live with liking music about people being terrible if it at least presents a balanced image of what happens when people are terrible. Music like this doesn’t look back on those times when they were young and robbing and killing niggas with a sense of sorrow or regret; they look back on them like they were good ass times, and they want to tell you how damn fun it was. This album, like most of that old gangster rap, paints a wholly unrealistic picture and glorifies the worst parts of their experience. It never transcends the systems of misery they exist in, it only seeks to position them at the peak of what is they don’t seem to realize is actually an utterly flat, hopeless wasteland. Maybe that is liberating for them. Maybe they’d rather die than be the next Ice Cube. Who am I to judge.