I'm not sure whether we're still whining about rap artists supposedly glorifying violence or whether that was just a nineties deal with older white men who preferred their world music socially responsible and preferably well behaved. In any case, Jake ticks one fuck of a lot of those naughty, naughty boxes because - as you may notice if you look closely - he was telling it like it is, or was but almost certainly still is. It's no good asking people what sort of problems they have in their lives if you disregard the answers you don't like.
Anyway, Jake is from Flint, Michigan and has been a member of the Dayton Family at various points during his career. I don't know much about Flint beyond what I've learned from Dayton Family records, but I gather it was a tough place to live even before anyone noticed the water was poisoned but decided it would probably be okay because it was mostly working class black people holding the shitty end of the stick. Jake the Flake's debut is mostly concerned with what you had to do to get by in Flint back in the nineties, so it's kind of brutal if you're unaccustomed to such stories, but it's also absolutely real and therefore should be heard.
The mid-west sound of the time seemed to draw from west coast influences but with a harder, electronic edge - not quite Front 242, but maybe something from the next studio along with more emphasis on gospel, soul and end-of-the-line blues, and of course the rat-a-tat delivery which seems to distinguish the region from elsewhere on the rap map. This is a hard album, and powerful, and there's not much being glorified, although neither does our man give a shit about apologising for anything; and just like the Flint water crisis, as the evening news is my witness, we still haven't learned a fucking thing nearly a quarter century later.
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