Tools
w/Gatsby's American Dream, Surrounded by Lions, Grayskul, Marc Sense
Sat March 13, Chop Suey, 5:30 pm, $8 (all-ages).
"Blue Scholars is an experiment in the hiphop tradition of the potent MC-DJ connection," claims the first sentence of the bio posted on the Seattle-based duo's website. "DJ/Producer Sabzi's funk-inflected instrumentals provide a gritty, percussion-heavy texture that blends curiously with emcee Geologic's poetic mic presence." The proof of this statement's accuracy can be found on Blue Scholars' self-titled debut CD. The two do form a "potent MC-DJ connection." However, if separated, both Sabzi's beats and Geologic's raps could easily stand alone as complete works of hiphop art.
Stranger Personals
To begin with, Geologic is brilliant because he is complex without being intellectual (which is certainly not the case with Minneapolis' Eyedea or New York's Aesop Rock). Geologic never uses big words, or speeds up his raps to produce pretentious blurs of meaning and sound; he is clear, and utilizes basic meters to communicate the most involved concepts about his city, country, and politics, which I believe are Marxist ("Blue is for the color of the collar of my mother and my father," raps Geologic in "Bruise Brothers").
As for Sabzi, his beats are hard to describe because they don't suggest one or two direct points of origin. In his music, one hears several things at work--Pete Rock-like horns here, DJ Premier-like bass grooves there, and something that sounds like flowery funk comes out of nowhere. Though the ideas behind tracks like "Bruise Brothers," "The Inkwell," and "Evening Chai" are, like Geologic's raps, basic, traditional, and comprehensible, somehow they manage to sound utterly new and even surprising.
This contradiction at the heart of Sabzi's beats, matched with Geologic's solid grasp of English grammar, makes for a wonderful journey through the many highs and very few lows that constitute the whole of Blue Scholar.
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