Wednesday, August 30, at Chop Suey, the good folks at Obese Productions bring us L.A.’s offbeat Radioinactive, LA Jae, Mestizo, and Rheteric, but the cat I’m most interested in catching is former Company Flow member Bigg Jus. Who can forget how Jus’s darts kicked off the bulletproof classic “8 Steps to Perfection”? El-P and DJ Mr. Len have both been making better shit than their old patna ever since—I couldn’t seem to get into last year’s Poor People’s Day—but he’s still got my ’98 respect intact.
In a Chevy/I’m wonderin’ if the Feds broke the levy/Are they in with the devil to control the weather?
I used to frequent an establishment—that shall go unnamed—before I was old enough to drink; this establishment, while providing plenty of coffee and mediocre food, seemed to only have a few CDs to play. It was there that I swore I’d punch myself in the face if I ever heard DJ Shadow‘s Endtroducing again. Like my man Samson S. said, I didn’t need a haoli to tell me why hiphop sucked in ’96; it was called Ill Na Na. Anyway, that experience birthed an aversion to Shadow albums that I hadn’t shaken since—even though I’m a huge fan of the Quannum Projects collective he helps anchor.
I was fully ready to ignore his newest LP, The Outsider, like I did 2002’s The Private Press. While trying to YouTube videos of Turf Talk, however, I came across the clip for “3 Freaks,” a fairly convincing slab of hyphy craziness by Shadow featuring vocals from Turfy and Keak Da Sneak. Bizarre as the combo sounds, it works. Intrigued, I gave The Outsider advance a fair listen, and cotdamn, was I surprised. The project is as stylistically diverse as any Handsome Boy Modeling School LP, sometimes shockingly so; the mellow, blue-eyed soul of “This Time” and the pounding punk drums of “Artifact” just couldn’t be on the same album as the menacing go-stupid anthem “Turf Dancing”(featuring hyphsters the Federation and the Animaniaks), or the straight-up amazing dirge-crunk of “Seein’ Thangs”(featuring some of David Banner‘s most potent spit yet, fittingly on the topic of Katrina). An extremely Coldplay– sounding number gives way to a roots-rocked-out tale of groupiedom starring Little Brother‘s Phonte. The everything-for-somebody approach may not in fact work for everybody—the cheesy, limp club jam “Enuff” with Lateef and Q-Tip sounds uncomfortably like Black Eyed Peas—but to quote Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain”: I was not offended. Don’t sleep on this one.
While we’re discussing Quannum biz, cop Gift of Gab’s Supreme Lyricism mix tape (at www.giftofgabmixcd.com) for a reminder of his, um, supreme lyricism. No bullshit, Gab is one of the coldest cats out, not just for his dizzying delivery and $5 vocab; rather, it’s his ability to give his songs a certain emotional heft and a real spiritual center. I know I overuse the word “soul,” but he’s got it to spare. You can spare $12 for that, right?