Two years after their debut, Leaders of the New School return to release their full-blown sophomore jinx: "T.I.M.E.: The Inner Mind's Eye - The Endless Dispute With Reality", the title is as long as the record itself. Sheldon "Cut Monitor Milo" Scott (1970), Bryan "Charlie Brown" Higgins (1970), James "Dinco D" Jackson (1971) and Trevor "Busta Rhymes" Smith (1972), meet again to record another studio album after the success of the debut.
The production is made by the Leaders of the New School both as a group ("A Quarter to Cutthroat") and individually, with Busta Rhymes, Charlie Brown, Dinco D and Milo in de Dance making their own rhythms — Busta is the only one among them that really knows how to stand behind keyboards and provides five beats — along with Backspin, RPM, Rampage, Sam Sever and Raheem Isom. The "Spontaneous" posse is the only track that features guests. Being related to the Native Tongues, these guys are copycats of other hip-hop hippies in New York and end up creating a non-homogeneous product, in an attempt to badly copy bad projects of other artists, without fully exploring the few valid arguments and the few sensible ideas that they've managed to come up with clarity here.
The production is quite irregular, the beat changes almost completely from one song to another: Busta Rhymes' choices are pretty solid, he's not the best at picking samples, but he knows how to place drums and samples to create a jazzy minimal rhythm on which to spit something out energetically, making songs worth listening to. The rest is a kind of random mess, every single person does and says what he likes when he likes it, and most of the time you don't understand anything: they spit out random bars all the time, I guess even the engineers didn't understand three quarters of the texts provided. The intro is quite symptomatic: single spoken looped line, tight drum, light jazzy rhythm, then rhythm change and other random words are spitted out. The first three tracks are among the best ones in the whole project.
"Understanding the Inner Mind's Eye" has decent jazzy boom bap rhythm made by Charlie Brown, with decent samples and a slow, tight drum: someone spits something out, then Busta Rhymes destroys the cut with a wacky smoothness shouted mad delivery, worthy of the best ODB. The rest doesn't interest me. Backspin realizes the rhythm of the third song, jazzy boom bap with samples of a few elegant piano keys in the background and a perfect drum: there are two stanzas, then Busta enters and takes the cut with a dope performance. Similar speech for "Classic Material", there are all the members of the group, Busta at the fourth verse also takes this track on his first rhythm. In the fifth pick, the prodigy boy rests, I mean, he's there but he doesn't completely kill the piece, which he does in "A Quarter to Cutthroat", another high point: boom bap jazzy and dry credited to the group, dry and shiny drum machine, slow tight and syncopated, simple hook with bridge formed by a few piano keys, good delivery of three random generic rappers, then Busta Rhymes comes out of nowhere and walks away with a shouting and hardcore delivery, there's no debate.
This is basically the last flash, the last fiery arrow, the last shot of Busta Rhymes, before hibernating on this record. He doesn't kill any other tracks, not like that, until the "Spontaneous" posse, cut number twelve, it's been over twenty minutes and all nine guests that were on the record: on a Sam Sever jazzy boom bap, with slow tight drum and decent sample, these nine guests arrive. Someone is part of the Rumpletilskinz, there's Rampage and I've never heard of all the others. They all choose a pretty lazy delivery, eight bars each with no hook, most of the time they say nothing and the first three dudes are pretty resigned with weak flow and blend style: nobody spits like they're on a track from a hip-hop group studio album in 1993, which is supposed to be one of the best years ever in hip-hop history.
Damn, man, these guys look like they're in the studio with PM Dawn, I don't know what to think. Kollie Weed is performing in a ragga style, oh why? Do you know where you are? And the answer is "yes", his style isn't completely inadequate, because among the dudes hiding behind the Leaders of the New School name, there's someone who performed half the album with the same whimsical and annoying style. In this track of less than five minutes, which therefore for a posse of thirteen MCs should be a contained minute, finally the main rappers of this albums arrive, but, like the previous ones, they say nothing. Less than nothing: after about four minutes of noise, Busta Rhymes proves to be superior to everyone, he just goes away in style and it seems that he's almost asleep, absurd. He still enlivens the record with a shouted delivery in the following song, but by now the whole project is fruitless and ends with some mediocre cuts.
«Lust. Envy. Hate. Jealousy.»
Anthony Cruz aka AZ the Visualize is opening one of the best tracks that the nineties decade has granted to hip-hop history, "Affirmative Action", a posse with Cormega and Foxy Brown straight from Nas' mafia album, his sophomore, moreover. Here we find the four devils mentioned above. Busta is coming, uh, coming very strong. Others don't even see it. The remix of A Tribe Called Quest's "Scenario" proved it amply: everyone was there, but, above all, there was him. The youngest. The most talented of the four. The fact that Busta Rhymes managed to succeed with a group of dudes with names that would have served as a back-up to the Teletubbies should make you realize for yourself that the boy was already a myth even before making his solo debut three years later. Busta has been playing at another level for years, his classmates can't keep up with him: when he leaves first, they don't reach him, when he finishes the tracks, he ends up humiliating them all the same, it seems that before and after him there's emptiness, even when he's placed in the middle of the track.
In this sophomore, the band members are practically fighting each other in the studio: Dinco, Milo and Charlie Brown have no personalities and can't rap, they've no skills and they show it for over sixty minutes. As in the previous album, here I only recognize Busta: personally, none of the others tell me "I want to be recognized" and, in this case, I'm not interested in going to find who is spitting what. Produced by Elektra Records, a subsidiary of Warner Bros., the record is simplistic and ultra-bloated, with 61 minutes, 17 sizes 4 skits: the product is full of extravagant-abstract-incomprehensible generic lyrics, if you exclude the songs in which Busta Rhymes does something by lifting the cut completely on his own, no song stands out among the others and they all sound average nonsense. The A&R of the label, Dante Ross, notices the many gaps in the record and, after receiving a first finished version from the group, he asks them to completely redo the whole LP: he gets a second final version, which is at least as weak and exhausting as the previous one. Ross gives up: well, they'll rot in the charts (top 15 among rap records; the single "What's Next" is even first among the rap singles), while Busta Rhymes will set off on a successful career in mainstream rap.
Busta Rhymes Moments: "Understanding the Inner Mind's Eye", "Syntax Era", "Classic Material", "A Quarter to Cutthroat", "What's Next", "Spontaneous (13 MC's Deep!)", "Noisy Meditation".
Rating: 6/10.
No comments:
Post a Comment