Mainstream hip-hop continues to operate in thrall to
the notion that the ‘realer’ you are the
better; more specifically, the idea that no matter how
many pounds of gold you decorate yourself with, how
many idealized visions of femininity you have hanging
off your arm in your video clip, and regardless of how
unabashedly FM Radio friendly your celebrity knob tweaker
has made your track, you must always be ready to declare
your debt to the ‘underground’, even though
you’ve long since risen to more commercial climes.
Very few MCs can justify this hyperbole through their
choice of collaborators (not to discount super producers
such as Timbaland who have made a virtue of assimilating
avant-garde techniques into chart-scaling rap/R&B
bangers). A micro-hegemony exists in the populist hip-hop
game: if you don’t have the latest ubiquitous
name behind the boards – the aforementioned Timbaland,
Pharrel Williams, Kanye West – you ain’t
gonna blow up. Props to Lex, then, for taking Prince
Po, a rapper with undoubted unit-shifting clout through
his work as Organized Konfusion with Pharoah Monch,
and teaming him up with a genuinely diverse list of
beatmakers from both sides of the spectrum. You’ll
find very few projects in which overground names du
jour such as Richard X will rub shoulders quite so closely
with the more esoteric likes of Jel (who provides the
often horror-evoking template for Dose One’s frantic
muse in Themselves). Yet these disparate names –
add Madlib, Danger Mouse
and J-Zone for an impressively rounded list –
are united on The Slickness in the quest to
provide the ultimate minimal shuffle-and-bump blueprint
for Po’s gruff yet lucid flow. The Richard X-produced
Hold Dat is probably the highlight, with the
ever-inventive chameleon of the mixing desk turning
out a sparse, brooding two note synth riff that fizzes
with static as Po spits on top in tandem with guests
Jemini and Rell. The opening, Jel-produced Hello
is another obvious killer, Po name checking Depeche
Mode, Smashing Pumpkins, The Beatles and The Clipse
amongst others over a high hat-heavy loop with noisy
overdubs that recall a slightly muted El-P. Madlib’s
contributions are the usual raggedly inspired modal
jazz lifts, while the Danger
Mouse tracks reflect the timbre of his feted Grey
Album, particularly as Po’s wordplay
– ‘Hip Hop is under construction/Prince
Po’s the foreman ’ – is comparable
to Jay Z on the psychedelic funk stew of wah-wah guitar
and female vocals that is Love Thang.
Lex will probably be sniped at by purists for dropping
such a pointedly commercial release – The
Slickness is an apt title, and the ultimate lack
of variety in tempo and texture wears one down eventually.
But through this project the label has reinvigorated
one of the principle players of raw pre-millennial US
hip-hop, whilst providing an interesting new challenge
for the contemporary cats involved and thus forgoing
notions of ‘underground’ and ‘overground’,
instead inhabiting territory all of it own.
John Stevens
3.9/5 |
