128 Oz. of Haterade: 'Meta-Historical,' by KRS-One & True Master

"I'll splatter my data on rappers that don't matter..."

KRS-One can divide hip-hop fans. Some view him as a righteous teacher-MC who has been broadcasting truth from New York City streets for more than two decades. Some view him as an overly preachy defender of a brand of hip-hop whose time may have passed.

A song titled "Gimme the '90s" isn't going to help dispel those who subscribe to the latter group. Seven skits with the Blastmaster holding court, on everything from true hip-hop to the N-word to white fear of the black man, isn't going to help, either.

But pairing up with Wu-disciple True Master for a collab album definitely helps. Once only counted among the sonic architects of the disastrous sophomore Gravediggaz record, "The Pick, the Sickle and the Shovel," True Master eventually came into his own as a credible producer, and his simple, effective loops match well with KRS's flow.

Is it kind of annoying as he philosophizes on "Palm & Fist" about metaphysical reality? Kind of. Then again, listening to some excellently casual boasting on "One of Them Days" had me bobbing my head like the first time I heard "Rappaz R.N. Dainja."

KRS's overarching philosophy is on diplay in "Old School Hip Hop": "Back in the days we threw it like this on 'em/Beats and rhymes you didn't have to wish for 'em/Beats and rhymes today you gotta fish for 'em/'Cause most rappers traded ass and tits for 'em." Now that right there is some truth, and while Kris can sometimes get a little too professor-ish, it's nuggets of greatness like those few lines that keep him near the top of any great-MCs list.

Meta-Historical coalesces best in the form of "1-2, Here's What We Gonna Do," as RZA drops by for one of his best verses in years and True Master loops a forlorn guitar; it also shines on the title track, where KRS explores history in all its forms and importance.

Is it a perfect record? No. It limps out with a couple of clunkers ("Street Rhymer," "He's Us"), but along the way, it's a good reminder of why hip-hoppers still love KRS-One.

• Listen to samples from Meta-Historical on Amazon

128 Oz. of Haterade: 'The 7th Hour,' by 7th 7ign

It's a mixed blessing to hear a forlorn soul loop as the backing for "Spinning Wheel," the opening track from Wu-affiliate 7th 7ign's (Sign's) debut record, 7th Hour. On one hand, for an old Wu head like myself, it's a refreshing bit of nostalgia. On the other hand, there's always the chance that new-school hip-hoppers will accuse him of trying in vain to recapture the Wu's glory days.

To be sure, 7th Hour isn't going to surpass Enter the 36 Chambers on your top-albums list, but neither is it simply a throwaway Wu-crew record. 7th 7ign has a commanding vocal presence, creating interesting, slightly-cryptic verses, without descending into the massively-obscure arena that Killah Priest permanently occupies. And the production settles nicely between RZA's baroque, tortured soul and the muddy, lo-fi sound of the Killa Bees compilation records.

In particular, tracks like "Everyman Bleeds," "This is War" and "Spinning Wheel" stand out as promising examples of where 7th 7ign can go when he wants:

"The wheel starts spinning/The end is the beginning/Constant motivation my world's in rotation/My fam comes first/React you get hurt/'Cause the first shall be last and the last shall be first."

That's some old-school Wu shit right there, and it's always welcome in my record collection.

• 7th 7ign on Myspace

128 Oz. of Great-erade: 'Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Pt. 2,' by Raekwon

'Chef in the kitchen cookin' up with the crimeys...'

It's 100 percent unfair to compare Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Pt. 2 to its stone-cold classic predecessor. It just is. No matter how loud you go "OHHHHHH!" when you hear the familiar, ill loop on "Pyrex Vision" (an old Premier beat copped from one of my all-time favorite LPs, OC's Jewelz), it's not going to be the same as that first time you heard "Verbal Intercourse." Believe me, I want it to. I'm boom-bap to the bone, but the Golden Age has passed.

That said, Pt. 2 is every bit as great as I hoped it would or could be. It's easily the second-best album of Raekwon's career, and hearkens back to the original as much as it can without being deliberately backward-looking.

As someone who judges most rap songs based primarily on their production, I don't know if Rae dropped any of his best verses on the albums between the two Cuban Linx, because I truthfully have never listened to any of them in their entirety. All I know is that he dropped some sick guest verses over the past year (on Doom's joint in particular, over another old-school sample), threw down some equally excellent rhymes on two mixtapes, Blood on Chef's Apron and Cuban Revolution, and topped all three with Pt. 2. From the eerie organ on "Black Mozart" to the wavery, paranoid bassline of "Have Mercy," the record captures what I suppose I'd metaphorically call that "Usual Suspects" vibe that provided the backdrop for such intricate crime storytelling the first time around.

Rae shows that same attention to detail on tracks like "Catalina," the plucky "10 Bricks" and the hollow "laaaa's" of "Gihad." He even gets a little emotional over the perfect Dilla track in the ODB tribute "Ason Jones."




And it wouldn't be a proper Cuban Linx sequel if it wasn't guest-starring (billed right on the cover) Ghostface on at least a third of the tracks. He doesn't disappoint, blasting away on the the Clan-cut opener, "House of Flying Daggers" and the greatest Wu track in a decade, "New Wu," which will have you pulling out Enter the 36 Chambers all over again.

Some of the production exhibits a little of the clunkiness that caused older Wu records like The W and Iron Flag to drag on occasion, but it's so refreshing to hear Rae back in the saddle that it doesn't really matter. In fact, I'm gonna go ahead and dub this period of mid-'00s resurgence, from Masta Killa's No Said Date up through now, the Wu-Tang Renaissance. In that roughly five-year span, you have No Said Date, Made In Brooklyn, Fishscale (and More Fish and Another One I Can't Think Of), Chamber Music, Pro Tools, Dopium (debatable, I grant you, but still... a decent U-God solo record? That's almost a miracle), Cuban Linx II and even solid joints from former weed-carriers I had written off, like Bronze Nazareth and particularly Hell Razah (Killah Priest, I've just given up on... either he's just too deep for me, or he's the most boring intelligent rapper I've ever fucking heard. I'm also writing off Rza's Digi Snax, for reasons which should be obvious to anyone unfortunate enough to have heard it. Rza should tell Bobby Digital that he needs to stick to writing the script for the second season of "Afro Samurai").

So... welcome back, Chef. You cooked up another tasty batch.

The Mixtape Mash-Up

Above, Havoc's 'From Now On' mixtape

Work's been busy, so I haven't been posting quite as often as usual, but lately one thing I have noticed is that a lot of the stuff I've been liking lately has come in the form of mixtapes.

Now, I have a longstanding and generally mild distaste for the mixtape, as a collection of tossed-off B-sides and shitty freestyles, but I understand its function as a buzz-generator for the artist. One thing that draws me to some mixtapes is my passion for Jamaican dancehall music, which not only has mixtapes galore, but also has a variety of different artists giving their take on the same beat. Although dancehall usually takes a fairly spare beat and adds some instrumentation to go along with the verses; hip-hop mixtapes don't spice up the production much.

That said, a few have definitely caught my eye recently:

• Wu-Tang South, Wu South, Vol. 1 - This Baltimore-based group, which appears to be Rush and Cappadonna, along with a few select guests and the obligatory posthumous ODB verse, has supposedly been around since 2006, and this mixtape, hosted by DJ Saki, is seeing its "official" release (whatever that means) in 2009. Normally, anything with Cappadonna on more than half the tracks hasn't warranted my praise in the past, but this is a definite exception. "Here Today" kicks things off with a soul chop and a tinny keyboard line that feels like classic Wu without being classic Wu. "Born in NYC" mixes up a dusty synth line with a heavy piano, and "NYC City Standup" actually does do the dancehall thang, flipping Redman's "Da Goodness" with a buzzing horn hit.

• Havoc, From Now On - I've always been a huge Mobb Deep fan. And even though, starting with Murda Muzik, their work has been a little bit suspect (with a few notable exceptions), I always check out a new release from the QB crew. I have to say that it's kind of disheartening to see the G-Unit emblem on a Mobb Deep-affiliated record, but shit, times are tight all around. Is there even a Loud Records anymore? (Answer: Supposedly, it was resurrected as a part of Street Records, over the summer. Not confirmed). Anyway, I'm getting away from the point. This is a decent mixtape that retains the Mobb's menacing sound with a few new elements and little more flossiness ("We don't pop shots no more, we launch rockets"). The opener, "Smells Like 9/5," could have been a Hell on Earth B-side, "Letter to P" is a heart-to-heart sent out to Prodigy over a smooth soul choir and fuzzy guitar, and "24k Rap" nabs the bassline from Xzibit's "Los Angeles Times," adding some forlorn echoes along with verses from Ghostface Killah and the late J. Dilla. Definitely better than P's Product of the '80s.

• Bajah + the Dry Eye Crew, Kings of Salone: the DJ Gravy Mixtape - Thanks to Doc Zeus for putting me up on this Sierra Leone-based crew. They mostly truck in dancehall, with a few dashes of hip-hop thrown in from time to time. Actually, there's a fair variety of uptempo, danceable tracks on the mixtape's brief 31 minutes, ranging from party jams ("Bondo Kallay," "Laba Laba," "Any Girl") to neck-snapping hip-hop "Rapapumpum" to gladiator dancehall (the massive "Honda"). "Makossa" flips a familiar old-school beat, and "Give Me Your Number" is straight-up rocksteady. A perfect summer disc.

• Raekwon, Cuban Revolution - This is actually the second mixtape Rae's put out lately (Blood on Chef's Apron was the other) but Revolution is the latest round of material to keep everyone salivating for fall's supposed, alleged (dare I uttter it?) Cuban Linx Deuce, and it's pretty great. Featuring Ghost on a solid third of the album, it might as well be called Cuban Linx 1.5, or maybe Even More Motherfuckin' Fish. "Run Away" would fit in with any of Rae or Ghost's best solo work, "Better Shoot Something" works one of those old baroque-soul Wu loops, and "Slang Copulation" reunites out the old "Verbal Intercourse" trio with Nas, Ghost and some spooky ooh's (oh, and Cappadonna, too, but fuckit, he had his fifteen seconds earlier). Host DJ Memory Man even rounds things out with a loping soul loop that pairs up Ghost and Rae with a great Biggie verse. 

The Wu Ain't Through: 'Chamber Music' Review




It's hard not to root for a new Wu-Tang album to be great. Then again, it's also difficult to not compare it to their best work from previous years. Whether that's unfair or not, you be the judge. All I know for sure is that Chamber Music has the potential to be great, and at times, it definitely is, but it is also frustratingly short, and much of its most interesting instrumentation is tossed off on interludes.

There are only eight actual songs on this 17-track album. The rest are skits with RZA waxing rhapsodic about various facets of the Wu philosophy.

That said, almost all of the songs are killer, but their most interesting feature is their simplicity. As opposed to the RZA productions in the mid-'90s that had six or seven samples mashed up in them, these tracks are mostly very straightforward. "Kill Too Hard" is an organ hit and a string fill, "I Wish You Were Here" is a melancholy soul loop and "Ill Figures" is little more than than a neck-cracking beat and a mid-range bassline.

Guest shots from Masta Ace, Sean Price, Cormega, Sadat X, Havoc and others keep it from being the strict Wu-Tang affair that past clan records have been, but everything works.

128 Oz. of Haterade: 'Dopium,' by U-God, a.k.a. An All-Out Deathmatch for the Title of Wu-Tang Clan's Most Useless Member




"Yo Ghost, you think you could kick off the first verse on my new solo record, so people might forget that it's really by me? How 'bout that, god? Maybe we could also do a few inexplicable dance remixes and tag that shit onto the end..."

Once upon a time, there was an MC who went by the name of Masta Killa, and for quite some time - pretty much all the way up to the release of his first solo album, No Said Date - he was the Wu-Tang Clan's Useless Member. You know, like the kid with the fake braids in N'SYNC, or the Asian kid from the Neptunes. 

Then, suddenly, No Said Date heralded a new MK, one who was actually a half-decent MC and not just some ashy-voiced dude mumbling 5 Percent wisdom obscurity [and definitely not actually rhyming]. If you don't remember what I'm talking about, recall this gem from "For Heaven's Sake":

Now all pay tribute to this entity
A spark that surges through the undergrowth
overwhelmin the populace from the entry
The Wu-Tang Dynasty, has emerged
from this elite fleet
I was appointed to strike the vital nerve
Mouths tend to utter and speak empty words
Observe the magnetic attraction as we breathe
Seeds of MC's at these fake ass industry niggaz
feed off, the chrome mic tend to squeeze off
and spray, an array of shots
that travel downwind, just respect pyrhiffic pen
as I send, the minds of the weak
To rise and take power I blew tower-ing over the land
as we stand, expanding our C.R.E.A.M.
A dollar to every grain of sand
Let the mind use the physical as planned

Or gaze in fear and wonderment at his verse from "Triumph," which is what I was originally thinking of when I remembered that first verse:

The track renders helpless and suffers from multiple stab wounds
and leaks sounds that's heard
ninety-three million miles away from came one
to represent the Nation, this is a gathering
of the masses that come to pay respects to the Wu-Tang Clan
As we engage in battle, the crowd now screams in rage
The high chief Jamel-I-Reef take the stage
Light is provided through sparks of energy
from the mind that travels in rhyme form
Givin sight to the blind
The dumb are mostly intrigued by the drum
Death only one can save self from
This relentless attack of the track spares none

Now... there are words that rhyme in both of those, but they is by no means raps. Anyway, it doesn't matter, because his solo albums made up for all the badness. 

Subsequently, there's now a power struggle for the title of Useless Member, and it is between U-God and Cappadonna. While 'Donna splashed onto the scene with hot verses on Ghost's "Daytona 500" and Wu-Tang Forever, his solo debut was pretty bad and his latest, whose title escapes me at the moment, wasn't much better. U-God, however, made a great case for himself with the towering mountain of shame that is "Black Shampoo."

But luckily for Golden Armz, Dopium kind of redeems his lackluster legacy a little... or maybe it's his audition for a comedy-based band, I'm not sure. It's a bit disjointed, without question; there's no consistency to any of the beats, unlike most Wu solo records. But there are some bangers: the opener, "Train Trussle," tops a driving beat with strings, horns, and Ghostface; "Lipton" is a nice bit of lyrical handiwork, and the title track rides a heavy soul loop.

However....

...we then come to "Hips," which I presume is "the club jawn." And that's fine; it's got an old-school wah-wah synth bass as its bedrock... but if you play this for a girl, she's gonna get creeped out. It's just got a sort of sketchy-guy-in-the-club vibe to it. It actually sounds like it should be an Incredibad song, with a few humorous lyrical tweaks.

And then.....

...we arrive at the bonus tracks, three inexplicable dance remixes of album tracks, which definitely sound like Incredibad. I can see Andy Samberg chanting "Stomp da roach!" right now.

So if anyone knows whether Samberg and the fellas are looking for a token black guy, tell them to throw on the Felix Cartel "Hips" remix, pop some Ecstasy and then give him a call.

ADDENDUM, 6/29/09: I'm coming around a little bit on this album. I think the initial shock of the techno-house remixes got the best of me the first time around. As a production guy, I really like almost all of the non-remix beats. And while U-God has a neat voice, I think his full-lengths suffer from the same problem as the Chali 2na solo joint... the voice is great from time to time, but after 40 minutes, it gets a little tiring.