Common “Electric Circus” MCA
Records “Hip hop is changin’ / Y’all
want me to stay the same?” asks Common of his fans on his
latest album “Electric Circus.” Without question one of
hip hop’s elite wordsmiths, Chicago’s most well-known
MC has once again switched up styles ““ this time, neosoul has
given way to acid rock, and the results are unlike anything in
recent memory. Featuring guests ranging from Prince to Laetitia
Sadier of Stereolab and producers from ?uestlove to The Neptunes,
“Electric Circus” finds Common attempting a hip hop
interpretation of rock “˜n’ roll history, fusing in funk
and soul with reckless abandon along the way. Or maybe he just
wanted to find out what it would sound like to take OutKast’s
1998 masterpiece “Aquemini” and cross-breed it with
Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. Either way, Electric Circus is
undoubtedly one of the best hip hop albums released in the past
year, despite the pretentious missteps (e.g. songs that just
won’t end) that inevitably occur in any genre-bending effort
of this nature and deny it status as a hip hop classic. -Alfred
Lee
GZA “Legend of the Liquid Sword” MCA
Records All it takes is some mythologizing, aggrandizing
and patronizing, but one problem to creating your own legend is
that you can use up your poetic license before you leave the
parking lot. “36 Chambers” was the Wu-Tang Clan’s
coup d’etat; it set the tone but also set the ceiling high,
and while a few of GZA’s compatriots have helped keep the
collective’s myth alive, the joy ride has often been little
to brag about. GZA’s not an exception to the inconsistency,
but his calculated rhymes never lose the edge and still, well,
mythologize, aggrandize and patronize. He flows over a melange of
styles: cinematic sweep meets sparse G-funk rhythms, but the key
here is restraint. The sound is relatively economic and GZA’s
guests never dominate his earnest sense of self. He’s not
genius enough to not be set back by the occasionally monotonous
production, but when he tells you “I’m the obscene
slang kicker/ with no parental sticker/ advising ya’ll that
wise words are much slicker” he’s actually got the
deftness to make it convincing. In a perfect world that can be the
stuff of myths, in a less-than-perfect world it’s mere
pleasantry. But these clansmen never quite lived in the same world
as us. -Andrew Lee