MUSIC: Welcome to the Doghouse

After getting hit with Ta'raach's The Fevers and Black Milk's Popular Demand within the first two months of new year, I thought 2007 would be a great year for hip-hop. Boy, have I been disappointed. Since early February, a slew of hotly anticipated releases (by myself and/or others) have dropped and, in my opinion, few have matched the hype, or even approached vaguely close. The major offenders (off the top because I don't want to dwell on the negative):

Chamillionaire, Ultimate Victory

It should be no secret around these parts that I've been a major Koopa partisan for quite a few years now. I even dug his material enough to put up with hours of sloppy rapping from his brother Rasaq (if you haven't heard him, he's got a style only a blood relative not directly responsible for fathering him could love). His 2005 major label debut, Sound of Revenge, was the sleeper chart-topper of the year and wildly underrated by everyone except the 1.5 million people who bought it. Since then, Chamill regularly tore apart guest verses (see Papoose's "Pop the Trunk" or the "Party Like a Rockstar (Remix)") and dropped a solid-if-inconsistent free mixtape (The Mixtape Messiah 2)... all signs pointed to a strong second effort from Houston's platinum-jawed wunderkind. Then Mixtape Messiah 3 hit the streets, full of goofy cadences and half-ass rapping that had me more than a little worried. I pretty much knew Ultimate Victory would be an iffy effort when Chamill started discoursing on MM3 about his loss of love for rapping.

Unfortunately, Ultimate Victory ended up worse than expected. Having spun this disc endlessly to squeeze every last redeemable ounce out of its stony grooves, I feel secure saying it's more or less 19 versions of the same song, complete with identical workmanlike rhymes and identical, generic-ass, slapping-me-in-the-face, drilling-into-my-left-ear-drum-with-various-pieces-of-heinous-looking-dental-equipment beats (meaning both the beats and the mix are subpar).

The only thing that upsets me more than the mailed-in-edness of Ultimate Victory is the sudden Chamill bandwagoning going on in the independent hip-hop blogosphere. In what's rapidly becoming my favorite quote for reviewing, "Do you cats listen to music or do you just skim through it?" I'll boost the size of the font to simulate yelling and righteous indignation:
ULTIMATE VICTORY IS NOT LYRICALLY OR MUSICALLY BETTER THAN SOUND OF REVENGE.
Grammy Syndrome (def.: honoring the present work of an artist to atone for ignorance or underappreciation of their prior, more inspired work) strikes again.


UGK, Underground Kingz

Pimp C and Bun B take filler to new heights on their recently released double CD. [Disclaimer: it's easy to rip on double albums because they're so long.]The only thing more clever than the duo christening themselves "Big Dick Cheney" and "Tony Snow" (after George Bush's vice prez and press secretary, respectively) is their astounding ability to recycle lines from earlier in the album further on in the album... sometimes a full 3 minutes later. Even slimmed down to 14 tracks (with a heavy emphasis on Disc 1), the repetition is out of hand. Case in point: if you didn't catch it the first time through, Pimp C thinks that "pimpin' ain't dead, it just moved to the web" (and he has a full business plan to exploit it... "it's the American dream").

Let me also take this opportunity to say that Pimp C may very well say "Bitch" 15 times a track over 29 tracks. It's not just that he uses it as a noun a lot -- he uses it in ways that have no grammatical significance. It's like he's got Tourette's, but his only tick is "Bitch." A simulated sentence (not far from actual recorded sentences): "Bitch, I'm Pimp C, bitch, bitch better get down bitch on that flo' bitch." I don't think I'm a conservative listener at all, and I'm not easily offended, but... for real?

I think my disappointment comes from listening to Pimp C's infamous, amazingly incoherent, and incoherently amazing "Atlanta Interview," where he more or less -- it seemed -- threw down the gauntlet on the entire Southern rap game, accusing its major figures of spilling out boring, fake, socially irresponsible music. I can't say that Underground Kingz has single-handedly reclaimed the game.

Now that I write that, though, maybe there's more to the Cheney-Snow comparison than the phallic/narcotic valences: UGK does a pretty good job running the same reheated rhetoric past woefully uncritical listeners.

{At least Chamillionaire and UGK still have careers. Mike Jones. Who?}

On watch: Pharoahe Monch, Desire

Wildly




Wildly




Wildly






Underwhelming.


So who was spared my wrath?

Hell Razah, Renaissance Child
I've also been a massive Hell Razah partisan since his days with Wu Tang affiliates Sunz of Man. Since the late 90s, he's dropped a series of independent mixtapes/albums, each of which had few shining moments but were crippled by an astoundingly bad selection of beats.

My expectations for Renaissance Child were, as a result, pretty low when I copped it at FatBeats a few months back. After giving it a single spin, though, I realized I had one of the year's undiscovered gems in my hands.

The album definitely lags in places, a built-in flaw of Razah's style. Razah, along with Killah Priest, has been working on what I call the "ghetto syncretist" style: their songs draw equally on the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, the Koran, 5%er rhetoric, the history of the African diaspora, black nationalism, the civil rights movement, etc. Regardless, or maybe, as a result, it's well worth checking out, and I might have a formal review of it up soon.


Madlib, Beat Konducta in India, Vol. 3 - 4

The latest installment in the Stones Throw beatsmith's Beat Konducta series did not disappoint. Vols 1 - 2 have been on repeat for me for over a year while I've been working on my various writing projects. India is definitely a "produced" album - he's not just looping beats from Indian films. That being said, it's much less altered than the material from 1 and 2, or even from his Blue Note project. In that respect, this album is more like traditional DJing work... which is great, because DJs (and hip-hop writers) seem to have largely abandoned the work of finding new, unheard music for listeners. So I guess that makes this sort of a meta-review.


Kanye West, Graduation

Still need to give this time to sink in. My first reaction: much more sonically focused than Late Registration, but maintaining that degree of manic sloppiness we've come to expect from the Louis Vuitton Don.









Other Albums Getting Well Deserved Play in the CanineCompound

Feist, The Reminder

Her beautiful voice is being ramrodded down your throat by Verizon and Apple. Three cheers for the corporate world.










American Analog Set, Know by Heart

A soothing, hypnotic set. Like staring at a wall, watching a clock ticking down the final seconds to a moment of foreseen happiness.