In 1990, Geffen Records moved to MCA and Warner Bros. was forced to look for another subsidiary, choosing the independent Giant Records, a label for which Divine Styler signs thanks to the friendship he has with Ice-T, a top artist of Warner Bros.
Divine Styler (Rhyme Syndicate) is the pseudonym of Mark Richardson, a native of Brooklyn, but who in the spring of 1991 is in LA, in the Hollywood studios, to record his second album. He employs a couple of engineers and a couple of non-accredited instrumentalists for bass, drums, keyboards and guitars, for the rest he does everything, from the composition of the music to the lyrics passing through the mixing, keyboards, guitars and percussion and almost all the other tools. In the span of two months between April and May 1991, the album is completed, but the artist waits almost another year before releasing it, in March 1992.
It's a very long LP in its short sequence, only twelve tracks after the intro, but no song ever goes under four minutes except the final cut, and often exceeds five minutes in length, with peaks at eight ("Walk of Exodus") and nine ("Heaven Don't Want Me and Hell's Afraid I'll Take Over"). So, the record holds you for almost seventy minutes. The album deals, in part, with his life: this ghetto boy ends up in prison and here redeems himself by converting to Sunni Islam. From a lyrical point of view, Divine Styler deals above all with Islamic themes and Islamic religiosity in the midst of metaphysical stanzas and his texts are often completely enigmatic and cryptic, several times they're close to spiritual poetry, not completely comprehensible or full of meaning. Fans who rediscovered the album over the following years and decades have been divided over whether the guy here's in the balance between completely losing his mind and finding spiritual enlightenment, while the few critics who have tried to listen to it, they haven't extrapolated conclusions far from these ones. Musically, Richardson doesn't produce beats, there's no concept of "beat" here: they're musical choices, which sometimes fall on jazzy, funky or other background noises, but often there's just one musical carpet that mixes many different styles including funk, ambient, industrial, electronic, folk, rock, rnb, hip-hop and noise, so much so that the whole project is difficult to categorize into a single musical genre.
On this eccentric and dark soundscape, Divine Styler prefers a delivery in spoken-word, with scattered screams and sung parts, and arriving to rapping only after fifteen minutes in "Livery", at the fifth song, repeating himself in the next cut "Gray Matter", who is also the latest track performed in rapping. He makes a number of impressive cuts for the period, unique and brilliant especially when the record hits its spiritual section. The album is something completely different from the rest of the previous and subsequent hip-hop scene: it's bizarre and curious, spiritual and personal, with disturbing traits, and it's one of the most experimental, avant-garde, forward-looking and jaw-dropping projects of its time. The artist is too far ahead for everyone, he's twenty years ahead of his scene, a true precursor of his time. Even more curious is the fact that it was released by a major label (Giant is a subsidiary of Warner Bros.), unfortunately without obtaining sufficient commercial feedback and being largely ignored by critics, unlike the debut, which remains an album completely different from its sequel, as it's practically performed by a different artist.
A project heavily neglected by the hip-hop scene, it's among the most underrated and influential albums of the entire genre, obtaining the status of a cult record among fans, because every single song here has influenced artists who arrived in the following years and decades: from the sci-fi choices ("Am I an Epigram for Life?", "Love, Lies and Lifetime's Cries", "Gray Matter", "Aura"), to industrial hip-hop songs in which Divine Styler proves to be among the pioneers of Dalek and Death Grips ("Touch", "Mystic Sheep Drink Electric Tea"), up to the metaphysical experimental songs that pervade most of the record.
Highlights: "Touch", "In a World of U", "Grey Matter", "Heaven Don't Want Me and Hell's Afraid I'll Take Over", "Mystic Sheep Drink Electric Tea", "Euphoric Rangers", "Walk of Exodus".
Rating: 9/10.
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