Brooklyn babbler J-Live is a self-confessed and self-professed Real MC, keeping it real by keeping his shit tightly lodged in the jazzy hip-hop heritage he's cultivated to hallowed nostalgic heights in his real live mind. And so the gifted gabber grabs the mic and rocks the spot like it's '89 and he's riding the lines, making real fine while showing you just how real his Real is, ditching belligerence and surreptitiously spitting on all of that "thug shit" to rhyme with peace-ing and love-ing phonetic panache, kept to fat-free, highly rhythmic syllables that always have in mind something approximating tite flow. J-Live's native tongue deftly wraps with salivatic smooveness around flowery circles that deliver daisy-chained rhymes about all those good times, with a few serious numbers giving "conscious" listeners the issues to consider. "Emceeing is my craft," J says, and so he provides true-heads with the equivalents of, what, macramé and carpentry? He and intermittently-appearing spesh-guest pr'doosah DJ Spinna have a knack for the knick-knack; the backing tracks herein are so smooth/funky/nice that they'll even impress rare-groove dudes. And "nice" is a prevailing thought across the set. J-Live cultivates a sense of almost-dorky sweetness. His nerves seem best represented by the fact that, after taking so long to have his first record released, he's scared he may never get a chance to put out another. So, the record is filled to the brim with 78 minutes and 21 tracks of unashamedly romantic hip-hop-ism. The romance for hip-hop is obvious on "Like This Anna," his romantic number that is more of a love letter to A Tribe Called Quest's "Bonita Applebum" than any girl called Anna.
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