Derrick "D-Nice" Jones was born and raised in Harlem, Manhattan, later moving to the Bronx as a teenager. Here, he met DJ Scott La Rock and formed Boogie Down Productions group along with Lawrence "KRS-One" Parker in 1986. After carving out a slice of success producing "Self-Destruction" for the Stop the Violence Movement, in the late eighties he signs a solo deal with Jive Records and creates his debut studio album.
It consists of accessible production and generic rapping. The rhythms chosen here are simple, minimal, jazzy, skinny, D-Nice seems to be able to play its cards with banal lyrics, but he always sounds uninspired even when it's pretty fluent. "Call Me D-Nice" is probably among the most successful track: simple and hard rhythm with heavy, rough and lacerating bass, the delivery is syncopated.
The other pieces are struggling: on the fourth one, there's a piano to accompany the syncopated and jazzy rhythm chosen in production, this piano is sick and suffering in the background, it shouts for help but no one seems to want to help it, in fact it dies out soon supplanted from the skinny and empathic boom bap on which the rapper continues to drop slow and syncopated bars. D-Nice reserves some energy in "It's Over", then falls qualitatively towards mediocrity.
Launched by a couple of singles, the title track that topped the rap chart and "Crumbs on the Table", #17 in the same Billboard chart, released by Jive and distributed by RCA, the LP enters the Billboard 200 and peaks #12 among rap records.
Rating: 6/10.
No comments:
Post a Comment