Missy Elliott - The Cookbook (2005)

 

Excepting Tinchy Stryder and those who came in sideways from either garage or hanging out with Calvin Harris, I've generally thought of rap-rave hybrids as an abomination based on Missy's reasonable but disappointing So Addictive and Puffy's rave album - which was ill-advised even by his standards. It feels like good ideas retooled for a shitty weekend in Blackpool, music for Jersey Shore-based ennatainment sponges, and so I picked this up out of a sense of loyalty more than anything because how bad could it be?

It seems I'd missed a couple of albums in the wake of So Addictive during which she apparently got her shit together with a few overdue reminders of where rap came from. So by the time we get to this one we're back in business against all my expectations, which is one hell of a relief. At first it sounds like an exercise in nostalgia with contemporary (as of twenty years ago) touches, but it spreads and grows and becomes very much its own thing. The old school affectations are upfront with guest spots from Slick Rick among other less obvious choices, borrowing Apache from the Incredible Bongo Band via Sugarhill, and backtracking the rave element to the bass music spawned by Planet Rock, saving ecstacy references from referring entirely to things other than the experience of being very, very, very happy about something; so the whole is more of an homage than doing a Showaddywaddy in rap terms. The production sparkles with feeling in keeping with the culinary metaphors for music as soul food with the usually ubiquitous Timbaland taking a back seat, leaving the left field squelch and crunk to the Neptunes and others, notably Rich Harrison who is still chucking a drum kit down a fire escape and somehow turning it into the funkiest fucking thing on Earth*; a dynamic which is powerfully echoed on Bad Man, also featuring Vybez Cartel and which feels like getting caught in the world's worst hailstorm, but with timpanis and kettle drums instead of wee lumps of ice. Even with all this technological overload, much of The Cookbook excels in its simplicity, reminding us that rap can be just a rock hard beat with lyrics and the occasional hoot of a horn section.

The Cookbook is more or less a perfect album, one of those that feels like it does you good as you listen; and being as she hasn't released much since, maybe Missy thought so too, possibly realising she'd never be able to top this; also meaning I get to be down with the yoots dem by writing about the latest album from, even though it came out two decades ago. Missy always had a fantastic voice and things to be said, should that need stating, and here's where she said them best.

*: I say still because I've only just heard this album, although to be fair Rich Harrison spent much of 2005 chucking a drum kit down a fire escape and somehow turning it into the funkiest fucking thing on Earth.

Tinchy Stryder - Catch 22 (2009)

I've a feeling this was the last CD I bought before I left England in 2011; and so, landing in Texas with only those worldly possessions which could be stuffed into a single suitcase and a music collection chiselled down to about ten discs, this one received a fair old hammering for the duration of my first six months in San Antonio, at least until I was able to ship the great bulk of my shit over in February 2012. Consequently it has a particular place in my affections and carries certain strong associations. During my most recent return visit to the old country, I came close to big manly tears of nostalgia whilst eating proper sausage, egg, chips and beans in a Bermondsey cafe full of bricklayers and road sweepers with the radio tuned to some station playing roughly the same autotuned hybrid of grime and R&B as is heard on Catch 22. I could be missing something but this kind of thing now sounds very, very English to me - actually very, very London to further narrow it down. Possibly there are a million US stations playing variations on Tinchy Stryder, but I can't be arsed to sift through the great wealth of those playing country, western, country and western, western and country, and that We Are Young shite by Fun - which is apparently the name of the band, the really shit and annoying band.

Tinchy Stryder came up through grime as part of Roll Deep, and this album was apparently informed by a desire to break through into the mainstream, which is what it did, and does, to spectacular effect, mashing together all those weird pingy grime beats with big screen stadium trance techno, producing what may potentially be the most weirdly uplifting hybrid ever made. The grime element is true to its roots, raised on the sound of arcade games rather than Beatles albums and yielding sounds resembling nothing heard in nature, and not even heard that much in electronic music prior to 2009 - grinding synths burping away as the tonal equivalent to the sort of alien flavours only found in kid's sweets, the sort of thing Junior always seems to want from the ice-cream place when we stop by - bright dayglo turquoise and purporting to taste like cotton candy soda, whatever the hell that is. Add to this the trippy sequencers, glo-sticks, and Tinchy's confident but never puffed up delivery, and it's air-punching, head nodding, euphoric stuff which doesn't really sound like anything else I've heard.

Catch 22 is one of the most bizarrely artificial things I've encountered in terms of what has gone into the recipe, but it feels paradoxically more human, organic and emotionally potent than almost any other rap record I can think of. Of course, the heavy trance techno element probably disqualifies it as rap for those purists insisting that UK rap is only UK rap if it's been directly sanctioned and approved by Rodney P, but fuck 'em. When stuffing a handful of essential CDs into a bag and abruptly moving to another country, this one was a great choice.