"To a black and white scene I bring the purple tangerine," Edan boasted
on his debut, 2002's
Primitive Plus. Turns out he was one album
early — where
Primitive was a rough and rugged, funny and
frantic lo-fi tribute to the old school,
Beauty and the Beat
rains down bushels of psychedelic citrus like it grows on trees.
Edan isn't the first hip-hop producer to jock the Count Five along with
the Funky 4+1 — Diplo and DJ Shadow spring to mind — but he might be
the first whose album sounds like it was recorded direct-to-reel in the
Chocolate Watchband's garage. Fans of Madlib's smoked-out style
(especially "Strange Ways" from
Madvillainy) definitely won't
feel out of place exploring Edan's musty, staticky soundscapes,
constructed from raw early-'90s drum loops and dirrty
Nuggets-style rock samples, along with smatterings of soul, jazz
and classical. Doesn't sound like rocket science on paper, but
Beauty and the Beat is one of the freshest-sounding albums in
ages from an indie-rap scene that often can feel more stagnant than the
machine-tooled major-label stuff it's rebelling against.
What really puts the album over the top is the way Edan manages to
twist the DNA of two distinctly throwback styles, '60s psych-rock and
'80s golden-age hip-hop, into a 2005 mutant plaid platypus. ("Edan
concentrating on put Syd Barrett face on Biz Markie body and Kool G Rap
brain," reads a recent entry in his, um, illuminating
biography.)
His rhymes have ditched most of the gonzo Ween-meets-Eminem tactics
that dotted
Primitive Plus — "I jerk off in my cereal/ You
couldn't even fuck with the grand imperial" — but Edan's nasal
syllable gymnastics still deliver a high PPM (punchlines per minute)
and run circles around MCs whose idea of a complicated rhyme scheme is
having 16 straight lines end with "bitch."
As an illustration of Edan's sonic evolution, hold up
Beauty's
"Making Planets," a collaboration with Mr. Lif, next to
"Rapperfection," their team-up from
Primitive Plus.
"Rapperfection" reinvented battle rap from scratch in mom's basement,
with Edan and Lif rhyming over the concussive blasts of an 808 gone way
into the red. On "Making Planets" the music is much more subtle — a
loping bass line for Edan's verse, chiming rhythm guitars and backwards
loops for Lif's, with the two segments connected by the kind of amateur
musique concrete that zonked-out garage bands would record in one 3
a.m. take to burn the last of their studio time.
Guest spots are relatively scarce here, but Lif, Insight and Dagha have
no problem getting amped on even the most off-kilter beats; not that
avant-garde chin-stroking is always something to be sneered at, but
tracks like "Rock and Roll" with Dagha have enough manic energy to lay
flat a dozen Anticons and Anti-Pops (while still sounding mad weird).
Killing it on "Torture Chamber" is Percee-P, a big shot in Edan's
personal pantheon of fast-rap legends, who was last seen making "Your
ho hafta go afta her weave from the breeze as I blow past ya" on "A
Day at the Races," the only great song from Jurassic 5's
Power in
Numbers.
In his "death of hip-hop" screed "Telegram," Saul Williams offers the
prescription of replacing weed supplies with magic mushrooms to help
MCs see past their reality. Edan does him one better: "I use pens like
hallu-cin-o-gens ... the notes on the page become ants that run
frantic." Put
Beauty and the Beat in hip-hop's water supply and there'd
be, like, no more beef, man ...
