Mark "Divine Styler" Richardson, then known as Mikal Safeyullah, was born in Brooklyn, New York. Becoming friend of Ice-T, he enters in his crew Rhyme Syndicate and in 1989 drops his first studio album. The record is produced along with his friend Bilal Bashir and features The Scheme Team, Divine Styler's crew. It's a pretty extravagant record, a bit like the cover, where you can see the author's name but have difficulty identifying the title, perhaps, and you certainly can't understand that in the bottom right corner it says that the boy's crew is featured.
The simple and minimal funky rhythms are functional to the delivery of the rapper, who instead of offering the typical delivery of the generic MC, drops entire spoken songs. When he wants, he has a pretty cool rapping style, but often he doesn't want to, helped by excellent funky samples (James Brown above all, but also JBs, Dennis Coffee, Bobby Bird, George Clinton, Bob James, Jimi Hendrix, ESG, Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye). Personally, it turns out to me quite irregular, with excellent cuts and honest songs in sequence, some of his reggae choices are quite successful even with a light-hearted delivery.
Released by Rhyme $yndicate Records, distributed by Epic / CBS, the effort is supported by the unique single "Ain't Sayin' Nothin'", that keeps a scratched sound similar to that of House of Pain's "Jump Around" (1992) and Cypress Hill's "Insane in the Brain" (1993), peaking ten among rap songs chart. For over fifty minutes the boy is hardly saying anything, yet the record gets its own following, which allows him to break into the charts (#62 in the rnb chart) and to continue his recording career, signing with Warner Bros. Records and creating what over the following decades will be clearly identified as one of the cult albums in hip-hop of the nineties, "Spiral Walls Containing Autumns Of Light".
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