This is the definition of an obscure album. I listened to all the 1992 records on my list before I went to review them and when I got around the top thirty, I found that I completely bypassed this LP. This group comes from Philadelphia and is made up of Oatie Kato, Swayzack and Madd on rapping, and is accompanied by a support live band consisting of Mark Boyce on keyboards, Derrick Pierce on drums, EJ Simpson on bass, Pierce Ternay on guitar, while 1 Take Willie puts the scratches. They choose a cover that would need several explanations and a quite mediocre name to release their debut studio album, released by Ruffhouse Records, a hip-hop subsidiary of major Columbia.
This unknown Pennsylvania group chooses to perform a political hip-hop album, with topics such as racism, police brutality, social inequalities and criticism of conservative politics and its representatives. Their lyrics are clever and controversial, almost all the bars are heavy and loaded with good content, however, the album isn't the classic it should be, it's not in the same shelf with works from Public Enemy, NWA, Boogie Down Productions, KRS-One, Ice Cube and Paris, stops a step below Da Lench Mob and Ice-T.
As a whole, it's a coherent effort, but too long and in the second part it starts to be monotonous: typical formula of De La Soul records, twenty-five tracks, half are skits, over seventy minutes of listening. It's a bad method that in fact doesn't work here, even the group manages to entertain better with the dozen skits than with normal songs: these skits describe the story of two boys looking for their uncle, and act as a political thread for the entire concept-album, but at the same pointlessly inflate the entire project, taking away its replay value and above all smoothness.
The joints are fine lyrically, but they're all undermined by one of the worst productions of the year, incredibly poor and horrible. Musically, this album sucks and the cause are due to the main producers, Joe "The Butcher" Nicolo and Oatie Kato, one of the three performers on the record. Manuel Lecuona and Madd (another rapper of the group) also deserve a mention, who certainly slept during the mixing. The amount of commercial mistakes between beats, samples and wrong hooks is almost maniacal: "Typical American" has a disturbing funky boom bap rhythm with a very annoying and irritating sample, this is a choice I didn't really understand, it ruins the whole cut.
The fourth track has a weak rhythm, the sixth boasts a weak chorus, "Cumin 'in Ya Ear" has an energetic intro, funky boom bap, decent tight drum, slow and cumbersome hardcore delivery and a hook that features another bad sample. "Got Kinda Hi", pick number nine, presents another annoying sample on lo-fi beat, while the following freestyle has a mediocre delivery on cheap music. "Wrong Pot 2 Piss In" is condemned by a weightless, skeletal production, with yet another annoying sample, at this point I wonder: where do they find them?
The delivery here also leaves something to be desired, with a slightly more hardcore style, it would have stood out more easily. I also begin to wonder when will the first decent rhythm to match these superior political texts arrive, and, unlike the previous question, here the answer comes and goes immediately: track number thirteen, boom bap jazzy with what I would be led to think is a very rare sample guessed and, indeed, it's not. It's the work of Gary McKeen on the trumpet. In this cut everything seems to work, unfortunately, it's only a coincidence since the second part of this long LP is sunk by boom bap funky minimal rhythms that border on mediocrity and other bad choices in production, with annoying samples, ridiculous hooks and gray deliveries.
With a different production, a different execution, better lyricism and rappers who weren't so technically mediocre, it would have been a great political album. But it was going to be someone else's great political album, I recommend the still too underrated Paris. That story of comparing Christopher Columbus to Hitler demonstrates a lack of propensity for the study of history and the culture of metaphor: for obvious reasons, this comparison is inappropriate, but, you must please excuse me, I don't think a review of a mediocre political hip-hop album should be the place to process them all.
Rating: 6/10.
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