The
second album from 26-year-old Winnipeg born MC McEnroe
comes with the potential - as casually acknowledged
on second track Life's Too Easy Pt 2 - of the
laziest listener/journalist drawing parallels with what
the man himself describes as 'that washed up tennis
guy'. The only tenuous, ultimately pointless connection
one could make between the two is a shared sense of
bristling anger; an aggrandised, pervasive feeling of
specific, personal injustice. Yet this McEnroe's beef
centres more upon a perceivedly all-consuming cultural,
political and social malaise than anything so trifling
as the trajectory of a little yellow ball. The very
title ties the rapper to associations of the embittered
blue collar guy, a sense perhaps fostered by years of
battling to disseminate forward-thinking hip hop music
in his adopted country, Canada, while the recipients
of his ire are clearly the overarching forces of political
economy that have forcibly tightened their homogenising
clench on western culture (most pertinently here within
the music industry) in the 21st century. Whole songs
are devoted to desert-dry deconstructions of the A&R
process (Dumb It Down), over-reliance on fast
food (6.25 At The First Window) and the bullish
pursuit of payment at all costs inherent in commercial
rap (Suge Knight). Worthy subject matter, all,
yet the declarative, world-weary tone endemic in McEnroe's
heavily ironic wordplay leads one to respond, instinctive
and invariably, with a slightly perplexed 'so, what
next?'.
As an indictment of the state we're in Five Years
In The Factory works fine, but there is a stark
dearth of solutions offered, while musically speaking
his beats and lifts offer nothing to either shake or
develop one's notions of what leftfield hip hop can
do. Timid wah-wah led instrumental One More Tomorrow
is hardly a block-blazing entrance, while the supposedly
cod-Neptunes steez of Dumb It Down sounds more
like a discarded Non-Prophets cut when set against Mike
Ladd's devastating post-crunk production on The Majesticons'
Beauty Party, or indeed elements of his recent
Nostalgiator full-length. In fact, one wonders
what McEnroe makes of protagonists like Ladd, the Anticon
collective and other such adventurous cohorts: artists
who have long since ceased stewing over what is, instead
focalising what can be, abstracting and subverting the
message to offer a genuine challenge and in their own
way galvanising the overall effort to push out the tide
mark of popular culture in the process. Sage Francis
- an undeniably close sound-a-like - works in a different
manner by dint of the smorgasbord of variant, autobiographical
emotions he brings to the table: McEnroe, sardonic and
reactionary to the last (albeit with the briefest of
respite towards the album's close), has an ally in us
all in the struggle against the foes and false idols
he declaims, yet, lyrically, musically and conceptually,
the question remains: what next?
John Stevens
2.6/5 |
