In My Changer, 2/8/03: Dead Rapper Edition

KMD

Black Bastards

Metal Face Records

and

Big L

The Big Picture 1974-1999

Rawkus Records

Two dead rappers have been booming over my speakers lately. KMD is a group, and the dead rapper in question is Subroc. According to ego trip's Book of Rap Lists, which is recommended to anyone with an interest in this hip-hop biz, "This Five Percent trio had reduced itself to a duo—leader Zev Love X and his brother Subroc—by the time of its second LP, and with the change in personnel came a more pronounced musical and lyrical aggressiveness. Bastards' sonic landscape—formatted around sound bites from original Last Poet Gylan Kain's album, The Blue Guerilla (Juggernaut, 1970)—provided a bewitching structure for songs like 'Sweet Premium,' 'Black Bastards & Bitches' and the dizzying introductory collage 'Garbage Day.' However, what should have been a celebration of K.M.D.'s Low End Theory-like maturation was never realized. Elektra Records' disapproval of the LP's cover art and eventual dropping of the group supplied the first huge setback. Subroc's sudden death in a car accident represented a final, tragic post-script."

But not completely final. The album is out, with original cover art intact: a blackface character hanging from a ramshackle gallows with the words BL CK B ST RDS spelled out beneath, and the obvious answer on the reverse. It was released in 2001, obviously under Zev Love X's direction, but with KMD's 1994 bumpin' jazz style intact, all sinuous bass with just the right amount of chirping and pounding to keep the musical texture varied. The sound is reminiscent of Black Sheep's first album A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, but more adventurous, with the sound samples indeed framing some of the best production.

You'll think first of the sound of the album if you hear it, too, because the vocals are mixed pretty far beneath the bass. (This may well be an artifact of the unfinished state in which Elektra left the album.) Unfortunately, if you listen carefully, you will realize that there is a reason for that. The lyrics burst forth with energy but don't have much in them content-wise; there's the alcohol song and the weed song and the sex song and a couple politically-oriented songs, but the kaleidoscopic production masks the fact that we keep going round and round with the actual words. Stock phrases are either shouted proudly or modified minimally throughout, and many times the vocals are drowned in a controlled chaos that works well as a musical element but emphasizes the lyrical sparseness. Occasionally, the lyrics rise to power in this way, as in "Black Bastards!", but not often enough. Of course, it may well be that I'll discover the power of the lyrics through the bass on (many more) repeated listenings.

Still, even if I don't, many hip-hop albums succeed almost entirely on their production, and as the title of this column indicates, Black Bastards has been a choice item holding down the number 4 slot in my Sony for a while now. And for one song, the production touches genius. The album proper ends with the words "Subroc, word is bond and I'm gone," which leads immediately into a remix of "What A Nigga Know" built around a sample of some female jazz vocalist unsteadily and affectingly intoning the lines "I saw the thunder and heard the lightning/And felt the burden of his pain." The senses may be mixed up, but the sense is true, as Zev Love X begins his rhyme with the words "I'm all alone like a sneaky ass nigger," and it takes on a new resonance, knowing who's gone.

Not that the lyrics themselves are nostalgic (more braggin' and boastin'), but we can at least hear the lyrics in between the sample for once, over a warm drumbeat and subtle bass. It's an apt sonic memorial for an album whose photo tribute to Subroc shows the rapper wild-eyed and holding a machete next to a barren tree, looking like he's up for some late-night drug-fueled lumberjacking.

Big L's photo tribute on The Big Picture is a lot more conventional: a collage of the rapper in all his various getups and with all his friends. It fits better an MC whose stock in trade was meat-and-potatoes underground lyricism, the type that mostly stomps hard on the beat and viciously insults all who think the "you" in the rhyme refers to them. Big L excelled at his style, as is evidenced by the roster of stellar underground MCs (Fat Joe, O.C., Sadat X, Guru) and producers (DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Lord Finesse) who felt compelled to work with him before he got shot in a nightclub in 1999. There's even a dead-rapper duet between him and 2Pac, in which both do their normal thing (2Pac lamenting, Big L insulting) to good effect.

I don't mean to suggest that insulting is all Big L can do; he's got some nice storytelling skills as well, as evidenced by his turns on "The Heist" and "Games." (The latter song, by the way, features a verse by Guru that is absolutely the weakest verse from him I have ever heard. "Games, these girls nowadays, they play many/Techniques for getting your loot, they got plenty," it begins, and it actually gets far, far worse. ) The beats, hard and precise whether from luminaries like those named previously or from lesser-knowns Ron Browz or Ron G, fit Big L's rhyme style perfectly and slam brilliantly in their own right. Of particular note is Primo's claustrophobic minor-key assault on "The Enemy," which inspires some absolute lyrical savagery from L and Fat Joe, Pete Rock's crystalline yet funky flute over a solid bass on "Holdin' it Down," and Ysae's impressively off-beat gilded bump on "Games."

But I've been talking about L's lyricism without displaying. Here's an extended quote from "98 Freestyle," although he's almost as quotable on every other song. (Warning: hardcore language coming!) "Before I buck lead and make a lot of bloodshed/Turn your tux red/Far from broke, got enough bread/And mad hoes, ask Beavis, I get nothin' but head/My game is vicious and cool, fucking chicks is the rule/If my girl think I'm on you then that bitch is a fool/How come you can listen to my first album/And tell where a lot of niggers got they whole style from/So what you acting for?/You ain't half as raw/You need to practice more /Somebody tell this nigger something before I crack his jaw…" L's full of punchlines like that (my current favorite is "I got more dimes than the Sprint lady"), and the surrounding buildups are so dextrous and L's flow is so implacable that you are consistently compelled to listen especially close to Big L even among the other rhyme stars who rock the mic. Over the album's span, you can see a lyrical sensibility developing, and if it's not especially subtle it's extremely satisfying. The only thing wrong with The Big Picture is that there won't be a sequel.

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