Sometimes, the AKAI needs to be emptied. You may have a few hundred unused loops and half rhythms that at some point, need to be canceled to make room for other ideas, other loops, other rhythms. In that case, would it really make sense to lose that hundred beats to no avail? Yes. Maybe, it would make sense. But if you are a professional producer, you could always try to place some on the naive around town in exchange for a few extra dollars. If you are one of hip-hop's most celebrated producers, you can afford even more. RZA finds himself with his old MCP 2000 full of rhythms that nobody uses. They are neither good nor bad, there is nothing memorable, exceptional, or even just excellent. They are waste. They must be placed. Or, to use the words of Robert Diggs himself, someone has to eat them. But who would take them? None, in 2000. Not in the States. Bobby Digital guesses the right idea and decides to trim his scraps to about twenty unfortunates around Europe with the ultimate aim of making a studio album and raising some money.
The producer takes over two years between travels, registrations, permits and various negotiations to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, recording the songs in 36 days (according to him: it's elementary that the number cannot be casual), and half a dozen different countries. RZA boasts of having sent beats worldwide, but in fact, in its final tracklist, there are performers almost exclusively from Sweden, Norway, Germany, France, Great Britain and Italy. It's only one continent. Even better. If you take the first geographical atlas of your... wait, I'll make it simpler: if you google the words "western europe", one of the results you come across is a map in which all these countries are colored. Steelz didn't send beats all over the world, he didn't even send them across one continent, there's only half a continent represented on this LP. Six countries. A time zone. Two if you count the British artists.
This 73-minute, 19-track tape is an ambitious project with few precedents in hip-hop, but certainly not the first ("La grande truffa del rap" by the duo Gente Guasta, is a similar attempt, released in 2000): bring together some of the major exponents of the European scene in a single project. Feven and Petter from Sweden, Diaz from Norway, Xavier Naidoo, Curse, Afrob, Sékou, Fuat, Bektas and Da Germ from Germany, Bronz N 'Blak, Blade, Skinnyman and Mr. Tibbs from UK, Frankie Hi-Nrg MC from Italy, Saian Supa Crew, Bams, NAP, Passi and IAM from France. To them, are added the American singer Deborah Cox and the MCs of the Wu-Tang Clan Ghostface Killah & U-God, as well as RZA who participates in some songs.
These numerous performers, they come with their game, not their best, most of them aren't truly inspired. The rappers do their job, RZA behind the keyboards is no longer King Midas since years, he can no longer turn his mediocre loops into pure gold. Most of the songs simply sound generic, there's a heavier socio-political content than your regular rap record, and few stand out from the rest. Curse boasts one of the best performances in "Ich Weiss", to the same beat as Wu-Tang's "Iron Flag". Ghostface Killah and the Saian Supa Crew provide one of the best moments in "Saian". IAM don't disappoint in "Seul face à lui". Bams literally does what she wants over the syncopated rhythm of "Please, tends l'oreille", and she takes the track with a dynamic delivery and a singsong, velvety, fantastic flow. U-God, uncredited, should be the icing on the cake of the best song on this LP, instead, his verse feels like a scrap from the Wu-Tang album sessions, it comes with frayed thug n brag bars, but I don't have much of which complain about his performance.
The album is distributed in Germany by the local Virgin branch. In the end, RZA isn't satisfied with the project, he doesn't believe in the project. Something will come back to him in economic terms, but he wants to forget it. In the United States, the album isn't distributed. In 2005, Think Differently Music releases the instrumental version, unofficially. This CD is pioneering and forgettable, fairly generic. The really important thing is that now Bobby Steels can clean up his Akai and go back to making music. 5/10.
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