This is surely the strangest rap album to ever spawn a Billboard Top 15 hit, but then again 1993 was a crazy time. Produced entirely by Butterfly & featuring no guest emcees, the album benefits from the group members' control of tone, free of outside influences. It is its own beast, though the antecedents are clear: DJ Premier &, most importantly, A Tribe Called Quest. The instrumentation is all jazz-styled (horns, upright bass, piano), & every track rides on top of robust samples from the likes of Dave Holland, Eddie Harris, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Curtis Mayfield, & more. There is some live instrumentation, but by design, it's hard to tell where the samples end & the live stuff begins. Because of this, some spots that sound identifiably un-swung, like the outro of "Time and Space," stick out in the mix &, ironically, end up providing some of the album's more memorable moments.
In addition to the musical consistency, all 3 emcees use the same flows on every song. (Again, ATCQ's Q-Tip is the originator of everybody's flows here.) You don't get the sense that they want individual songs to stand out, rather the whole album is meant to be experienced as one long piece. This sentiment is furthered by the opaque nature of the lyrics: full of slang, inside jokes, offbeat metaphors, obscure literary references, & words that feel chosen more for sound than meaning. The one exception is the cleverly titled "La Femme Fetal," in which Butterfly mounts a concise, cogent, woke as fuck, unadorned argument for abortion. It's uncharacteristically straightforward compared to the rest of the album, & is the most obvious expression of the group's politics, aside from their repeated suggestion that their listeners read Marx.
The group's aforementioned careful control over tone extends to the vocal delivery. All 3 emcees employ a style of offhanded cool, focusing more on stoned softness than on aggression or vocal flavor. The overall impression is of '90s Brooklyn Black coffeeshop hipsterdom, & while some might find that a little too precious, it's a world I would have liked to experience in the pre-internet days, so I'll take it mediated by a record.
None of this should be interpreted as me denying the existence of standout songs: the aforementioned "La Femme Fetal," along with "Last of the Spiddyocks," with a beautiful combination of trumpet sample & bass sample, & how they play off each other rhythmically is even more engaging when they layer the trumpets on top of each other; "Escapism," with a more conventional, less sample-led rap beat complete with skanky guitar & even a G-funk styled synth; & the Billboard hit "Rebirth of Slick," a song whose impact is the same whether you've heard it once or 700 times. But this album's draw is its consistency, not its peaks--as the kids today would say, Reachin' is a whole vibe.
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