I want to know what it is, not what it's been, and we know Beans has been the
Mr. Ballbeam, displaying artistic onions as he straps hip-hop to his
back, hoping, with all the hubris he can muster, to lug it into some
future-music future of fried-out elecktro zaps and muzapper's hat-backwards
heroics hitched up to headscratching with only a reverse-Mohawk sown-in-a-row
in the road. Of course, that hasn't stopped our boy Beans from playing
the aw-shucks card, thinking his beats so nice they're helping old ladies
across the street, paying deference to the Warp that big-up'd him by
leaving the circus and frying up the circuits, the beeps and bleeps mutescreamin'
beatmade streamers strewn from a ceiling whose glass he long ago broke.
Reasonable People, this one's for you. His future-of-hip-hop future already
arrived when he delivered Tomorrow Right Now in last year's past,
but with that futurist history now yesterday's old now, the Beans discography
gets a tacked-on postscript, sewn anew with a Now Soon Someday setting
its sights on the never-coming horizon, knowing the day'll get here when
today's tomorrows drown in yesterday's sorrows (given us humans're doomed
and all). But for now, on Now Soon Someday, we get a whole cremaster
load of new b'tween-LPs testicular acktion, straight from the Ballbeam,
nutted up with only a couple remixes from famous traveling folk El-P
and Prefuse 73, both of whom forget getting ready to rock on "Mutescreamer," instead
halving the tempo to suit their stoner's mood. Which is fine by this
version of Beans. On the album preceding this, Beans barely kept beats
at anything less than exuberant, but here he's happy to go off the beat
with a laggard "Databreaker" missive supine in an islander's recline,
and is sad enough to shake out the skeletons from that "Crevice" in the
closet, fists Slam-ing on shit he authored back in his poetic open-mic
salad days, setting such red-raw words to an oiled-up church organ churning
like an upset boy's nervous stomach.
|
