The early 2000s was a time of elite, respected emcees turning into crooners & alienating their hardcore rap fanbases. Within the space of a few years, CeeLo Green of Goodie Mob & Andre 3000 of Outkast both released solo albums where they did more singing than rapping. So when Mos Def's highly anticipated sophomore album dropped after a 5-year wait & he spent the opening track warbling like Thom Yorke over tinkly piano & brushed drums, it's easy to see why a lot of rap heads felt abandoned. It turns out that was an unfair characterization: there is rapping on almost every song, & at least half the tracks are full-on rap songs (in particular "Sunshine," "Close Edge," "Grown Man Business," "Life is Real" & "Champion Requiem" would fit nicely on any other Yasiin album). But the damage was done--the problem isn't the lack of rapping so much as the deemphasis of rapping. Yasiin is a very verbal person but here he wanted to make an album that spoke through sounds, & for every conventional "rap beat" there's an unexpected detour that takes us down a musical back alley. In the process, he takes us on a journey through his own deep love for all types of Black music, putting jazz & blues & rock & soul in a blender with hiphop & ending up with a unique indulgence that's never truly been repeated.
Before we go any further, I need to acknowledge my bias because Yasiin Bey is my personal GOAT. When he is really spitting, there's no other emcee's words that can affect me in quite the way his can. But there seems to be a deliberate change in lyrical style here: less poetry, more mantras, as if he's casting chanting spells, communicating with the universe rather than the listener. Songs like "Ghetto Rock" & "Sex, Love & Money" are rap songs that don't act like rap songs, with dub-style reverbed bass, pleading guitars, shakers & horn stabs switching up the flow. If the hardcore riffing in "Zimzallabim" & "War" seem to owe a debt to Bad Brains, that's because Brains guitarist Dr. Know also plays in Mos's band Black Jack Johnson, here going by his government name Gary Miller & contributing to a handful of tracks on this album. Rap, singing & spoken word all vie for prominence on "Modern Marvel," a 9-minute 3-part suite sampling & contemplating the place of Marvin Gaye in today's world. Like a lot of this album, the self-conscious artiness makes it sonically interesting but emotionally removed.
Of the straightforward rap songs, "Sunshine" is a highlight, a Kanye West beat sampling Hair that sounds like Black Album era Jay-Z, which Mos leans into by using a Jay-Z type flow. It's also the source of the chorus phrase for my friend Marcel P Black's "Principles & Standards," so we have that to thank this album for if nothing else. Another Jay-Z connection is found in the "Takeover" reconfiguration here titled "The Rape Over." I appreciate the message--commercialized rap music, sold out to corporate & government interests, pushes messages that encourage consumerism & support of American neoimperialism--but at the very end I get caught up by the regrettable line "quasi-homosexuals is running this rap shit." No way around it, Yasiin was wrong for that.
"Life is Real" feels like the closest thing to Black on Both Sides that exists on this album; it captures the same kaleidoscopic, fiercely intelligent verbality while offering a fine statement of purpose: "Reach the world but touch the street first." Call me uncultured, but I'll take more songs like these over self-indulgent stuff like "The Panties" & "The Easy Spell" (even though the latter features Mos on every instrument, banging out some Mars Volta-style experimental rock with hollow, insistent drums & mega-distorted bass & keys).
That's really where I come to in the end: what keeps me from fully engaging with this album is not the weirdness, it's the fact that the album seems to want to keep me at arm's length. Every once in a while the confluence of words & music hit me the way Yasiin's other work does, but those moments are outnumbered by moments of coldness. The result is a confusing but utterly compelling 75-minute experience, that unfortunately feels more alienating than not. But exploring another one of his many angles on Blackness & stereotype threat, I'm sure Yasiin didn't care what I, or any other white person, or indeed any other person, thought of it. He made art, & then while everybody was trying to decide if it was good or not, he made more art.
No comments:
Post a Comment