Great New Positive Rap Albums

Mos Def and Talib Kweli both have one of those things called rap albums in the marketplace. Well, actually this isn’t really true. Def owed Geffen an album, so he made one. Then one of the most bizarre record release controversies I’ve ever heard of followed. [1] Kweli’s album is free and produced by Madlib, who, if you don’t know, just won the Nobel Prize for Urban Musics.

Mr. Def, whose name is an abbreviation for the street slang “most definitely” and Mr. Kweli, whose name means “I talk the truth,” were part of a rap duo from the nineteen-nineties called Black Star [2], named after Marcus Garvey’s Black Star shipping line, which aimed to repatriate railroad tracks back to China. Black Star (or Black Star) told us truths about the world and used production from DJ Hi-Tek, a WKRP personality and the son of Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott. Mr. Tek’s work was clean, minimalist and nice, but also menacing in the way that Jack Johnson (the surfer not the boxer) is menacing [3]. Mos Def then split, because he had a feeling that his personality was bigger than Kweli’s, who was really kind of a bore. Def made an album called Black on Both Sides, which he recorded while wearing a fedora hat. BoBS was an album that told people about evil people in the world who conspire to quell fun, but it also had a song with an Aretha Franklin sample in which Def talked about coitus and heavy-petting, so you could play it at mid-afternoon sex romps. Like 3rd Bass and Steven Tyler before him, Def proved that rap could be liked by people who only used pyrex cookware to make muffins for the PTA bakesale, and 9mm’s to shoot “only people who were in the game already.”

Meanwhile, Kweli kept working with Hi-Tek and released an album without any actors on it, called Reflection Eternal, which was titled after the Buddist idea that if one reflects on oneself and the world forever, one will one day get to wear a robe with a hood and live on a mountaintop, where boomboxes are not allowed. This day never comes, however, because one would have to reflect forever before one is rewarded with the hooded robe and the boombox-less mountaintop, and since there is no “after-forever,” it’s a paradox. Anyway, that album was pretty good. Kweli actually brought the gem-like flame with “Move Somethin’”

After that initial bunch of critically acclaimed [4] LPs from Def and Kweli, then came the post-millennial, lets-make-shit-albums-because-either-we-don’t-care-about-rap-anymore-because-we-are-now-broadway stars-or-we-were-kinda-boring-in-the-first-place era of their respective careers [5]. Def released The New Danger, which tried to reclaim rock music from Europeans, who, according to Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, were able to co-opt a music that came from displaced Africans because of the particular layout of mountain ranges in Europe. There was a parody of Jay-Z’s “The Takeover,” from The Blueprint, in which Def said that lots of things are “runnin this rap shit” including “tall Israelis” and “quasi-homosexuals.” It was so cognizant that I nearly killed my hairstylists with an enormous mallet. Like Andre 3000 shortly thereafter, Def seemed disinterested not just in rapping, which was supplanted with his not very good crooning, but also in hip-hop, which he didn’t think could make him a famous enough artist. So a half-assed self-conscious crossover record it was, and we stopped caring about Mr. Def.

Kweli stayed with hip-hop and rapping, and made Quality, which featured Def on one track. At this point, however, the Native Tongues seemed like a refuge for college kids who figured rap had to tell them things that weren’t about “da club” or “da trap” to be good. Fearing irrelevance, Kweli make The Beautiful Struggle, which he thought might be able to ride Kanye’s College Dropout coattails into mainstream success. Unfortunately he made a flabby, awkward record. He tried to make a party album or something, but Kweli is a sober eunuch, so it wasn’t an apt look.

Finally we are up to the present, and after the deluge of albums by “rap kingpins,” the Black Star boys are back. Def’s album is called Tru3 Magic, apparently influenced by Numb3rs, the TV show, and normally I wouldn’t pay attention to it. There is more singing and a recreation of GZA’s “Liquid Swords,” which is a song that is too good to even approach, even if you had a gaggle of robotic elephant-superproducers who have The Wu-Tang Manualprogrammed into their circuits—let alone “cover” it or whatever he’s doing. However, Geffen either pulled some wily shit, or just fucked up royally and in a very odd way--some excessively shady record company dealings--I paid attention to that. The label shipped a few thousand copies out on a goddamn Friday, between Christmas and New Years, when the media sits at home and bathes in egg nog and people have no money anyway because they bought gold plated ceilings and priceless truffle-hunting pigs for their loved ones. Also, the album case was shipped without a sleeve, which may reflect the album’s rejection of superfluous consumerist imagery, but Mos Def is not a post-punk band with allegiances to Marxist theorists, so we can surmise that Geffen just didn’t give enough of a fuck to stick a piece of paper inside the case. Publicists for the label reacted strangely, saying that this meager offering was actually a “pre-release” limited-edition…uh…release, and that the proper album will come out in the spring. Soundscan tells us the album sold about 11,000 copies. A song on the album called “Undeniable” was nominated for a Grammy, and lots of people cared about this because the Grammy’s are great.

This bizarre situation was covered by The Village Voice, which, after firing Robert Chirstgau and Chuck Eddy, has opted for a music section with no credibility and a bunch of Pitchfork writers [6]. Makkada B. Saleh, who wrote The Voice article, is not a Pitchfork writer as far as I know, but he or she goes for some formal experimentation, which is not out of the ordinary for the very creative modernists at ‘Fork. The article is mostly quoted messageboard posts and blog comments that are hard to differentiate from the actual article, which is quite deferential and at times an all out laud-job. Here’s some great music crit: “despite its occasional lax moments, the album as a whole has an intensity and rambling impromptu-ness that few artists ever attain” I’m not one of the lucky folks to have picked up a copy of the LP, but man, it sounds like the album is as good as “Like a Rolling Stone,” by Bob Dylan. At the end of the article, Saleh writes that Def needs to stop singing and caps things with “all these motherfuckers tryin’ to be Al Green.” Wow, yeah, that’s true.

Kweli latest effort is not bound in controversy at all. That’s because it doesn’t cost money, that thing that usually makes humans yell at each other and challenge each other to foot races and stuff. The album is called Liberation, and Stones Throw, the label that likes cartoons and Texas High School funk bands, is releasing it. Madlib is at the helm, as he is with basically every rap album Peanut Butter Wolf puts out. There are 9 songs, and none them are very good because Kweli’s humorless talking has nothing to do with the Madlib’s beats, which aren’t his best anyway. Kweli talks about cous-cous and Bluetooth, namechecks Larry, Angela AND Ossie Davis, and says things about societal ills with pointless voice distortion. As is often the case when voices are put on top of Madlib’s compositions, Kweli dilutes the whole affair. Melvin Van Peebles samples and a squeaky-voiced alter-ego would’ve done better.

Things aren’t goin that well for rap in general, but it seems almost impossible that a “positive” Native Tongues-type rapper could have much impact now. It’s like trying to beat someone up with a sock without quarters in it, while reading from a book by Cornel West. .

Notes:

[1] And I was alive when the now infamous Hell Hath no Foxtrot controversy went down. The album was, upon the truncated terminus of a corporate listening session, defenestrated by Columbia Records for its “artsy fartsy inaccessibility.” Then, the story goes, a bum on the street, named Pickles Bob, picked it up out of the gutter. Thinking the tape was a correspondence from the CIA, who for years had been trying to steal his alchemy equation that turned Gak into a critically-acclaimed coke rapper, brought the tape to a fellow bum, unironically named Mentally Stable Lucious, who Pickles Bob thought was the second coming of Ronald Reagan, the one who could make all bad things good. Mentally Stable Lucious listened to the disc and saw it for what it was; that is, the thing that would save music and make it the art form that geniuses prefer. In a fit of entrepreneurship, Mentally Stable Lucious decided to stop being a bum and start a Record Company, which he titled Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti Records. He rounded up a bunch of fresh-faced subway car b-boys and taught them how to lip synch and wear cut-off denim jackets. The group, named Yuri Gagarin and the Space Racers, played a few shows with re-mastered versions of HHNF blasting behind them, at malls and ice-skating rinks. Despite the album’s limited pressing on boiled-down toenails, the record was met with universal critical acclaim. At first it was ignored by Rolling Stone, Spin, The Source and pretty much every other large-circulation periodical; however, the grassroots praise grew to a point where national magazines couldn’t ignore it. Yuri and the Racers were suddenly the hottest musical act in the world.

Then everything crumbled. Mentally Stable Lucious, it turned out, was a Russian mole who had been planted in the gutter by the KGB to wait for any uncompromising albums discarded by the American major labels, so that he could steal them, bury anti-American slogans in them during the re-mastering process, and then feed them to the unwitting American intelligentsia, who would accused of blasphemy by the government after lavishing praise on an album rife with pro-soviet messages. The plan didn’t work very well, since Mentally Stable Lucious forgot to translate the pro-soviet slogans into English, and critics fawned all over the random Russian phrases because, as one critic wrote “Yuri and the Racers are aestheticizing the Cold War, to the point were Russians and Americans might as well spooning on a bed of nuclear weapons in MoMA.” When the KGB heard the album, and Lucious' conspicuous blunder, he was murdered immediately and unceremoniously.

Ironically, it turned out that Pickles Bob was right, sort of. The CIA did record the album, with their house band. It’s just that it wasn’t a correspondence about Gak alchemy; rather, the Agency had been tracking Mentally Stable Lucious all along, placing agents at Columbia years ago. Lucious didn’t forget to translate the anti-American messages. A young agent named Rick Rubin snuck into the studio after Lucious was finished and changed it. Of course, the whole affair has been covered up thoroughly, as if it never happened. But yeah that was quite a controversy.

[2] Or 'Black Star' was just the name of their only album, it always seemed unclear to me which was the case.

[3] So menacing that you don’t even realize that you are being menaced until you no longer have a face.

[4] Rolling Stone gave all of them between 3 and 4 stars.

[5] I think that the whole really-long-hyphenated-phrase-joke-thing is so engrained that it warrants a CAPS LOCK-type command that eases the annoyance of forsaking the space bar for that small key in the Siberia of the board, where the clumsy ring finger reigns.

[6] At this point it is a cliché to accuse Pitchfork of bad writing, questionable journalistic ethics, and generally annoyance, but now that a lot of the writers are working for The Voice, including Tom Breihan, Chris Ott, and Zach Baron and the old guard of Eddy and Xgau are gone, its impossible not to see The Voice music section as a co-opted bunch of pages.