Gather 'round & let me tell you of a time before Youtube. A time before you could type "earl sweatshirt type beat" into a search bar & have a few thousand quality instrumentals at your fingertips. File sharing was unreliable & there were lots of fakes & mislabeled MP3s floating around. If you wanted beats, your options were limited, & they all involved spending money, time, or both. The instrumental rap CD is a dying (dead?) form, but it once served a vital purpose. It was always a good idea to have a few on hand to write to, freestyle on, vibe with in the background, or if you just wanted to hear the intricacies of production without an emcee's voice getting in the way. I used Deltron 3030 - The Instrumentals for all 4 of these purposes, but I was mainly interested in the latter. Deltron 3030 (the one with the vocals) was an important record for me for a lot of reasons. I'm pretty sure it was the first hiphop concept album I encountered--certainly the first I fully bought into because at the time (early high school) I was discovering cyberpunk & enamored with dystopian science fiction all while my rap obsession was deepening. It was also the first rap album I can remember where I was absolutely floored by the production. I mean, I was already a fan of guys like RZA, Preemo, DJ Shadow & Pete Rock (the first Petestrumentals was my other instrumental rap CD of choice) but Dan the Automator's work as part of Deltron 3030 was something special. The cinematic scope, the left-field weirdness, the genre-blending, the seamless blend of samples with organic instruments, & the overall musicality made it stand out from the pack, & it's those elements that make it a worthwhile listen even today, after its original purpose is no longer strictly necessary.
I'll admit that part of what motivated me to buy this CD was that, though I appreciate Del & think he is a great lyricist, I've never been a fan of his voice. The production on Deltron 3030 is so magnificent that I sometimes felt like his oddball warbling was getting in the way. The album opener "3030" (the instrumental album shuffles the song order but the opener is the same on both versions) is as good an example as any. After beginning its verses with guitar glissandos & flutes over a wandering bass, it adds wordless choirs into an unusually-timed 12-bar buildup before the orchestral brass explodes into the chorus. There's epic openers, & then there's this shit. Although the structure isn't avant-garde (like all the tracks on here it's pretty much verse-chorus-verse), it has a lot more harmonic movement & variety than your run-of-the-mill rap beat. That's the beauty of the Automator's vision here: the musical sophistication strains at the bounds of genre while the dusty drum loops & funky grooves keep it 100% hiphop.
(On a side note, I think that was my beef with the followup project Gorillaz, which grew out of Damon Albarn's collaborations with Del & Dan on this album. Gorillaz's huge commercial success had a lot to do with the distance it seemed to put between itself & hiphop. It was the kind of thing that white girls in high school praised because it was "more sophisticated than just rap" without realizing how racist that sounded.)
In fairness, not every track here stands on its own. A few of the more unadorned rap throwdowns like "Positive Contact" sound a bit empty without an emcee. That's the trap of listening to rap instrumentals: savvy producers always leave sonic space for a rapper's voice, & sometimes you can't help but think about how much better this would sound with somebody flowing on it. This isn't a problem on tracks like "Madness," a showcase for the album's other VIP whom I haven't talked about yet: turntablist Kid Koala, who turns in a scratched horn solo of the type he showed a brilliance for on his solo album Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. "Things You Can Do" is another beat that stands strong without a rapper, thanks to its reedy melodica (Albarn's contribution as well as on "Time Keeps On Slipping") & the rhythmic contrast of the sped-up Poppy Family sample with the thumping drum loop. The sinister decaying synths of "Upgrade" & "Virus" capture the nocturnal cyberpunk atmosphere that "Mastermind" balances with more conventional movie-score ambitions.
This CD was a joy to revisit, in large part because it's outlived its original purpose. This listen made me want to revisit the original album, & also check out their long-delayed 2013 followup Event 2. Like a past-its-prime android retrofitted for a new task, it's proved itself surprisingly useful in this uncertain future. I can't help but notice that, unlike a lot of SF authors who thought things would happen way too quickly (flying cars & moon colonies by 1997!) Del & co. seem to be about a millennium too generous--at this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if all the things they predicted for 3030 came to pass by 2030. Hiphop ahead of the curve once again.
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