Published on May 12, 2003
Hip-hop is a funny thing. Just when you’re about to throw up
your hands and swear that you’ve heard it all, that there isn’t
anything new that can be done with it, along comes something
else.
I’ve been into hip-hop since the first grade — roughly when it
first emerged as a type of music. The Bee Gees and disco music in
general were acting out the public’s need for a 1970s phenomena —
like grunge, poodle-haired 80s metal, the boy-band crisis,
rap-metal, McPunk, or diet rock, that were all significant parts of
the tiny eras they were/are inhabiting. Hip-hop’s timing, at the
peak of Travolta and disco fevuh, only made the many naysayers seem
like they were correct. When disco expired, though, and hip-hop
proved through Grandmaster Flash, UTFO, and LL Cool J (among
others) that it was only beginning, it confused a bunch of
prog-rockers and/or closet racists who only wanted to enjoy white
music made by white people. To them, James Brown is just that funny
black dude who pops up in movies like
Rocky 34 all the time, and sweats profusely, even at night.
Their music collection is probably so sanitary and perfect, so
lily-white, that even the thought of having Run DMC’s “Walk This
Way” on the television when their friends popped over unannounced
was a major source of embarrassment. A blow to their sense
of…sense.
The Anti Pop Consortium don’t make a lot of…sense. First off,
their name: They don’t have a bitch-killah moniker that lets people
know that toying with them will put somebody’s momma in a black
dress in a few days. Plus they don’t loudly exhale pot-smoke on
Skit #3002 of their quadruple cd (each disc having over a half hour
of “intros”), and 89% of their album isn’t one big, long boring
diatribe about A) how they are just preposterously endowed, and
make mules self-conscious, B) the mind-boggling quantities of pussy
that gets thrown at them daily, C) their names and faces being on
every police blotter in the world, even in places they’ve never
been, or D) they’ll kill you two times for daring to make direct
eye contact with them. Then they’ll give your momma anal sexual
healing. On your coffin.
If I was an A&R man that’s the kind of lyrics I’d expect to
get from either High Priest, Beans, Sayyid, or Earl Blaize. Instead
of that, I hear “Shark infested water, message in a bottle, no man
is an island. Individual visual MC. Me? I love life.”
I’ve always had a list of what I thought were the best hip-hop
albums of all time (in no order they are, thus far):
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back (by Public
Enemy),
36 Chambers (The Wu-Tang Clan),
Endtroducing (DJ Shadow),
Tical (Method Man),
3030 (Deltron),
Hard to Earn (Gang Starr), and
ATLiens (Outkast).
Dr. Octagonecolgyst (Dr. Octagon) has, since it came out in
1996, to me, been the ultimate, the
Pet Sounds of hip-hop. Having said that, I consider
Tragic Epilogue the rap
Revolver.