Diamonds in the Rough

I talk lots about futurism but I’m a roots person at heart. For me, immaculately produced pop records are usually too smooth to hold on to and too perfect to really love. Thus I’m feeling Southern crunk over anything else remotely popular in rap music, and grime (its closest U.K. equivalent) even more—there’s that apathy towards the world at large and a palpable dirt in the snares and low-end. Dizzee Rascal’s Boy In Da Corner, grime’s flagship full-length, wouldn’t have worked without its mediocre sound quality: it’s real rather than idealistic. These sounds aren’t formulated to please you; they force you to feel where they’re coming from.

My biggest problem with the acts most often associated with “realness” in hip-hop—Jurassic 5, Common, Blackalicious and so on—is that the idea of realness itself is all they ultimately represent. Common’s Like Water For Chocolate was meant to be a paragon of “soul,” but its Soulquarian tracks were so calculatedly proper that Common’s substance got buried in their style. “The Light” is moving enough, but there’s also a smugly clinical gloss all over its drums and guitar swirls that strikes me as vaguely horrifying.

Too much independent hip-hop, from Rawkus to Rhymesayers, suffers from that tidy precision—hanging onto skeletons of forms long after the first experiments made them stick.

Madvillain’s forthcoming Madvillainy is possibly the best offering yet from two of the last heads still making truly exuberant boom-bap. Madlib and MF “Metal Face” Doom are both obsessed with samples: the former remixed Blue Note’s back catalog in Shades of Blue and fashioned himself a rapper on helium by essentially sampling and speeding up his own voice in Quasimoto’s The Unseen; the latter reworked tacky Eighties hits and cartoon themes into eerily poignant hooks on Operation Doomsday. Both are bold enough to let their music get lost within the crates.

Here the duo leave every element unpolished, letting the sounds speak for themselves rather than impose a totalizing vision over them. Madvillainy wears its sources on its sleeve, sounding exactly like the two stitched it together from a roomful of records with a love nearing infatuation for their musical foundations. The “Frankenstein effect” hasn’t been done this well since RZA laced the Wu’s debut album, but whereas he had a penchant for the cinematic, Madlib and MF Doom just want beats that can flow with them.

Full of songs and instrumentals under two minutes long, the album shifts gears with dizzying speed, yet holds its internal dialogue at a comfortably blunted pace.

Found sounds (vocal snippets and a veritable orchestra of instruments) come and go over ramshackle rhythms, sounding so nimble and newly alive they border on stream-of-consciousness. You’re bombarded on all sides by sounds from all times. It doesn’t hurt that Doom has the flow to match, a drunken rambling full of non-sequiturs and bizarre metaphors as jubilantly lyrical as anything from hip-hop’s early Nineties golden age. Sampladelic psychedelia at its best.

Lately everyone’s talking about Kanye West, the man who helped Jay-Z start a new classicist vision of hip-hop in The Blueprint. Initially that record seemed like a triumph of the same underground “backpacker” values in mainstream culture—its straightforward beats and soul samples heralded Jigga’s return to basics and the inner reflection of his own early classic Reasonable Doubt.

But The College Dropout shows that Kanye is on an altogether different tip. His sped-up divas may have been nabbed from soul music, but they’re really kindred spirits with early rave anthems, whose chipmunk voices were pilfered and used for the same naively uplifting ends. (Charmingly ironic is the vocoder-led house number that bursts out of “The New Workout Plan”—work that drum machine, Kanye.) In contrast to the “faded photograph” echo in much of hip-hop’s sampled melodies, Kanye is relentlessly optimistic even when he’s down.

Whereas the likes of Madlib are celebrated for how creatively they can flip samples, Kanye sticks his neck out—stretching and fitting them together into sweeping intros, ornate choruses and hooks aplenty (best example: “Family Business”). He makes the art more like a genuine songcraft, for better or worse—no riff or melodic phrase repeats itself for long before it’s quickly interrupted or joined by new instruments.

This sort of outward development may be at odds with hip-hop’s basis in repetition and samples, pitting raw craft against the simple irreverence of stealing music. It’s no more risky than Madlib’s swarm of loops or anything the genre has already done, but it is curiously ambitious.

With the current landscape, Kanye’s songs are downright heartwarming. Perhaps my favorite moment on the album is how Twista, after being introduced like he’s Kanye’s best friend in “Slow Jamz”, raps in sync with the singer buried in the mix—utterly in tune to the track’s little flourishes. The sample, like much of Kanye’s sources, is sublimated into a wisp of texture that sticks indelibly in your mind. It’s that sensitivity to sound itself that gives these potentially awkward mini-epics their fragile beauty. They’re pretentious, imperfect and overwrought, and flawlessly so.