Busdriver - Fear of a Black Tangent (2005)

I heard somewhere that Busdriver was what the kids on the streets are listening to—excuse me, what the kids on the streets are checking for these days; and while most things associated with today's young people tend to be pure fucking garbage, I like to keep an open mind because I know it can't all be rainbow haired foetuses named after forms of anxiety medication. However, it turns out that Fear of a Black Tangent came out in 2005, meaning it probably counts as old school by now, although this may also be why it's worth a listen; so swings and roundabouts or summink…

Should I ever have given the impression, I'm not actually down on backpack rap - or underground, which is maybe a less annoying tag - just the stuff which sticks to the self-important formula while sneering at everyone else - the funky puritans who want you to expand your mind with a game of chess prior to making sweet lurve to your woman partner. Busdriver probably counts as underground, beyond which he's more or less his own genre - intelligent, and I mean real intelligence here, not just some bore aspiring to be your social worker. He's in the same ballpark as E-40 in terms of sonics and mood, also massively witty, which may not be obvious from the first few spins with that verbal firehose blasting away for an hour or more. But sense comes with familiarity, and the gags - delivered with deadpan earnest - are gutbusting once they emerge.

I replied to the wuss with a yo' mama's joke,
When he said how much he pushed the envelope.
A group of sexually ambivalent nihilst, crying from an ovarian cyst,
Picking at a vegetarian dish,
Idolising a German band who barely exist,
But me, my name's never on the full-colour flyer.
I'm just the dull Busdriver,
Thinking 'til my head is a bowl of dust fibers.

Musically, it's as distinct as it is lyrically, and I was surprised to see a full cast of producers listed, having assumed it could only be the work of himself, so beautifully formed is the vision as a whole. The sound leans towards actual instruments, as distinct from bleeps, glitches, and other elements not found in nature; but the way it's all put together is incredible - highly tuneful, and gently psychedelic in the sense of the Bonzos rather than the Legendary Pink Dots - although their name also came to mind. It would be pleasant if unremarkable but for the explosive energy somehow pinning all the notes to the beat, like it's threatening to go drum and bass without ever quite getting there, or if not drum and bass, then maybe one of the more manic Bugs Bunny cartoons run through the projector at four or five times normal speed.

...and by the point at which you believe you've figured all this out, you're now listening so fast that you can actually digest the import of Lefty's Lament, and so realise you've been listening to Public Enemy all along, or a tangent thereof; so I guess that's where the title came from.

Twiztid - The Green Book (2002)

Whichever way you look at it, Insane Clown Posse are one fuck of a tough sell outside of their admittedly huge core group of fans, not least because they probably should have called it a day with the first Wraith album, quitting whilst they were ahead. Understood by the uninformed to be some sort of Insane Clown Posse tribute act, Twiztid are therefore amongst those groups least likely to ever make it onto the cover of The Wire. That fifty-year old middle-class white guy boldly declaring Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions... to be the greatest rap album ever recorded, like he's really gone out on a limb, striking against the downpression in stating such a minority view, and partially because it's the only one he's heard - he would never listen to Twiztid, not even if somehow obliged to do so at gunpoint. He'd rather eat his own sphincter sautéed in white wine.

Although it's certainly true that they jump about on stage grabbing their men's bits whilst painted up as zombie variations on ICP's clown make-up for the edification of a grunting multitude of fans of whom less than 40% will ever study philosophy at either Yale or Harvard, the music of Twiztid really needs to be assessed on its own merits, to which end it probably doesn't get much better than The Green Book.

In fact, fuck it - it probably doesn't get much better than The Green Book in the context of albums ever recorded, never mind just the oeuvre of Madrox and Monoxide, as those responsible are identified.

To first dispel a few unfortunate misunderstandings, Twiztid are indeed two white guys doing rap music. White guys doing rap music can often be a bad idea, particularly if they waste too much time going on about being white guys doing rap music, overcompensating either by getting angrier and more dysfunctional than thou - as Eminem has done on occasion - or more self-important than thou as with many of those backpack types, each last one as wearily edumacational as Blue Peter presenters with their caps twisted backwards; and of course, there's also the just plain crap like the Kottonmouth Kings. That said, rap ability is not dependent on racial heritage and for every embarrassing wanker there's usually someone who vaguely knows what they're doing, and occasionally that someone will turn out to have the talent of a Haystak, an El-P, or these two, whose success can be attributed to their recording what they want to hear rather than necessarily what they think we might want to hear.

Twiztid extend toes across that rap-rock divide from time to time, probably because they feel like it, but they're at their strongest with this kind of thing which, for the sake of trying to stuff it all into a single sentence, is sort of like Mellow Gold-era Beck off his tits on some fairly nasty hallucinogenics and going nuts with the Halloween dressing up box, but funnier and a lot scarier. It's hard to believe that something which works so hard at taking a steady stream of custard pies in the face could sound quite this intense, but even interspersed with the gobbets of the sort of drivel that kept Beavis & Butthead gurgling along, there are parts of The Green Book which make Joy Division sound positively breezy. This probably isn't what you would expect from rap that spends quite so much time lost in talk of weed and boobs, but judge ye not...

I was recently annoyed on facebook by a person responding to the incident of twenty people stabbed at a Pennsylvania High School with the crowing observation of how much worse it would have been had the individual concerned owned a gun. So in other words, now even tragedies with no firearm involved may be legitimately used to score points by advocates of gun control as opposed to - just off the top of my head - acknowledging the possibility that such incidents might be a mental health issue relating more to the kind of carnivorous capitalist society America has become than simply because there are guns involved. Similarly, whilst it may be all very well to inform black clad teenagers that they're not living in Rwanda and therefore, by some definition, have it relatively easy, this doesn't really address the problem any more than the impossible dream of banning guns and somehow implementing such a ban. What might be helpful, I tentatively suggest, is for our society to at least try to have some sort of dialogue with itself as opposed to overloading everyone with unrealistic and even undesirable expectations; because - to get to the point - at least one side of that dialogue, or a significant voice therein, probably sounds like this album. The World is Hell and Marsh Lagoon, for two examples, cut far deeper than any of the usual whining emo stuff, not least for the sharp contrast of sarcasm and slapstick black humour even before we come to the weirdly empowering Fat Kidz which is as good and riotous an argument as I've ever heard for the more generously built to keep sight of their self-esteem.

Off the chain, off the scale, I ain't watching no weight,
I'm at the barbecue, high as hell, fixing a plate,
XX to the XL, hit me three times,
Come correct with my burger and fries, they're king-size.

The Green Book really needs to be heard. The lyricism is fucking exceptional, it sounds like no other album, and there's far too much here to describe in a couple of paragraphs. The associations with ICP, or its being too far removed in spirit from some record that came out thirty years ago will be too great an obstacle for some, but mostly people who wouldn't understand and therefore don't really matter. Its authenticity, for those who believe they have an understanding of such things, should be clear from guest appearances by E-40, Esham, Layzie Bone, and Tech N9ne, and from the quality of their respective verses going some way beyond mere rap for hire. I don't care how stupid it sounds on paper, this is one of the greatest albums ever recorded, a genuine classic.