Published on Apr 8, 2003
Busdriver’s reckless
Temporary Forever had some of the fastest rhymes ever put
down, but the thought of the Los Angeles emcee linking up with
Radioinactive, those quasi-Anticon colleagues, could make you pause
before picking this up. The Anticon label/movement gives suburbia
its own rapping folk heroes, and the majority of them rhyme like
Richard Pryor’s stereotype of a rhythmically challenged Caucasian
geek who crosses the street when an actual person of color gets
near.
Revenge of The Nerds works (obviously) in emo-punk, but
never, ever here. If it weren’t for former Anticon star Buck 65,
who kicks verses like my grandpa over Metallica breakbeats, the
entire scene would make me feel like I’d spent the day sucking on a
nickel.
Sonically,
The Weather was fascinating thanks to producer Daedelus and
his burgling of children’s records, jazz breaks, slo-mo funk
breaks, outer space sounds, violins, people whistling, and video
game noises. Songs like “Sleep Standing Up” were perfect on their
own, but Radioinactive just had to fuck everything up with their
free-form poetry rants, reading aloud of “To Do” lists and
haphazard rants about (italics)nothingatall(italics). Can you make
any sense of this: “Agatha Christie crafty craftmatic grassmagic
fertilizing mystery comfort optometrist firefighter, using a pair
of wire cutters to fire butlers when they just don’t cut it.”
Busdriver counters, similarly on-the-spot stoopid: “I should have
won them million doll hairs, but I left my wings in the car. This
is the dream of the hand-drum. You will be screened at random. So
put up your European hand-gun. Shoot you way out of your fish bowl,
okay.”
Mush Records is known for many far superior releases, notably
and recently Andre Afram Asmar, whose superb
Race to The Bottom makes
The Weather sound like a demo.