Debut studio album by Dwight "Count Bass D" Farrell, a Bronx native rapper based in Atlanta. The tape is self-produced and doesn't feature guests.
Relaxed funk-jazz music combines rhythms created by Count Bass D and live instrumentation provided by the author himself along with Mark Nash on guitar, Rod McGahaw on flugelhorn and trumpet, Roger Williams on sax and flute. The rap is executed exclusively by Count Bass D: he's not a good performer, his style is amateur and scarce, rusty, cumbersome, slow, poor. He throws up relaxed bravado bars, but shows no real ability to rap and sing. This dude is a discreet beatmaker, the music is decent and the tape sounds like a generic jazz rap album from your generic rapper, however, he's not a good rapper: according to me, his voice's bad and his rapping's monotonous, 55 minutes of this material is exhausting. All these midtempo and downtempo drums and melodic samples are wasteful, not exploited properly: with a competent MC it would be an honest album.
Sony, which has to distribute this product via Columbia via Chaos (which later became Work, under the Epic division), finds itself with this product and doesn't really know what to do with it, how to sell it: over 26 years later, I don't even know. What would this artist's market be? The Native Tongues audience, perhaps? The other jazz rap / alternative rap artists on the East Coast scene have better music, content and rap in some way, from A Tribe Called Quest to Jungle Brothers, from Brand Nubian to De La Soul. The record turns out to be a big flop for Sony, which bumps the artist: Count Bass D continues his career as an independent and builds his own niche core, however, this record feels not essential.
Rating: 5/10.
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