A hip-hop supergroup consisting of Gift of Gab from Blackalicious, Lateef the Truth Speaker of Latyrx, and producer Headnodic of the Crown City
Rockers . Not household names by any means but should you be willing to
leaf through the pages of hip-hop’s complex history, these figures should jump
out like the good, the gab and the ugly. Not much consolation if you don’t know
your spit from your spat, your triple rhymes from your party rhymes, your freestyle
from your battle, or your rude boy from your b-boy but here’s one simple way
to look at it; in hip-hop, the rap erupts from behind the turntable rather than
in front of it (I know that ‘cos I read it in Wiki). It’s not a gunslinger that
shoots from the hip but a man with a gun shooting off from behind the bar. Take
‘Gunfight’ featuring MF Doom. First up you have some wriggly, blues guitar thing
going on, a little extraneous feedback, some slinky bass slides, and then the
rhymes start slamming around. In rap the mouth draws first, in hip-hop it just
kind of evolves from behind the barrage of clips you load into your record-bag
– which probably accounts for the sheer range of non-indigenous styles breaking
out all over this album, whether it’s the shuffling funky twists of ‘Want You
Back’, the rumbling boom-bap of the rootsy ‘UFC Remix’ (featuring DJ Shadow),
the cheeky tanto tempos of ‘lll Vacation’ or the laser riddled techno of ‘Science
Fiction’. It’s an alternative reality alright, a bit like Westworld or Futureworld
where all manner of crazy cooked-up, vacating, rapper types get pursued across
some sprawling amusement park by some psychopathic android sort with a couple
of decks and a Roland Groovebox for brains.
More hip-pop than hop but a damned good brew all the same. And no stalling.
Suggested downloads:
‘UFC Remix’ ~ bass sounds like it’s been mined from a cavern and the
rest of it growls and buzzes like a dog plugged into the mains.
‘Laughing At You’ (Fatboy Slim remix) ~ As cheerfully dismissive as the
original but bursting with the kind of rumbling and boisterous big band activity
you’ve come to expect of the Slim.