Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Smoosh - “Rad”

Enunciation has such a huge role in rap.  People may describe a rapper as “gangster” and “poet”, “musician”, “entrepreneur”, but they rarely say “speaker”.  It’s worth hearing Smoosh rap, even if they slur like an Associate Professor of Linguistics who is about to lose his shot at tenure.  It’s a little like the Spice Girls rapping in “Wannabe”, but Smoosh is not just pretending to have fun.

Fugees - The Score (listen to “Ready or Not”)

Barack Obama’s favorite song, according to some magazine, is “Ready or Not” by Fugees.  I think he may rather have been thinking of the title, with respect to his presidential ambitions, than of the lyrics, which I’m sure would consternate your average person for whom rap lyrics cause consternation.  If you listen past Wyclef’s verse, which degenerates into hooligantry, Lauryn Hill’s verse is actually a direct commentary on gangsterism in hip-hop.

Not too many popular albums talk about parallax and retrograde motion, though.

A Tribe Called Quest - Peoples’ Instinctive Travels & the Paths of Rhythm You don’t really get to hear jazz bass outside of solos, until you start hearing it in hip-hop. This kind of recontextualizing sampling should be encouraged, since it doesn’t take from listeners’ prior love of something else. The music is woven together so well in this album that at one point I found myself wondering if it wouldn’t be just as good or better without the rapping, which is mostly goofy or oblique. But really, the words don’t cause any pain, and the music alone might seem too loungey. I guess the experimentation in this stuff seems a little heavy handed by today’s standards, but then, today’s standard is written out on the backs of A Tribe Called Quest’s record sleeves.