Blue Scholars
Bayani
[Rawkus; 2007]
The line between relatable and mundane has been a hard one for rap artists to straddle: for every time Del complained about the Oakland public transit service on I Wish My Brother George Was Here or Devin the Dude stressed about how to stretch $17 on Waitin’ to Inhale, there’ve been countless other underground MCs who rhyme about the struggle of their daily lives with the same ground-down fatigue that makes their living situation hard to tolerate in the first place. They spend so much time talking about their humble regular-guy status that they forget to draw an identifiable picture of what it’s really like to be there — and often what you’re left with is PSA rap, something that somberly feeds you information you already know and thinks it’s important for doing so.
Blue Scholars frequently risk falling into this trap during their sophomore full-length Bayani, even if they’ve got distinctiveness on their side. They play up their otherness as a nationally known hip-hop group from Seattle, dropping evocative regional references from 1980s Sonics fixture Xavier McDaniel to front-line accounts of the World Trade Organization demonstrations, while their ethnicity (MC Geologic is Filipino-American; DJ/producer Sabzi is of Iranian heritage) stands out as a prospective dialogue-starter in such a race-conscious genre. But while there’s admirable intent behind their working-class solidarity, the album could use a bit more levity and funk for fans still riding high off the party-political momentum of last year’s brilliant Coup album Pick a Bigger Weapon.
That said, you can’t lay any significant blame on Geologic’s ability as a lyricist: while he tends to rest his lyrics’ weight on a well-worn brand of conscious populism, they’re strung together with some worthwhile wordplay and frequent flashes of narrative sharpness. The immigrant story in "The Distance" pivots quickly from idealism to cynicism on a pointed phrase: "But this life was premised on a lie/ Instead of being promised by society the nature of economy is sodomy/ Ten generations of property turn to poverty." "50K Deep" is a firsthand perspective to the aforementioned WTO protests ("I admit, had to split when the first gas canisters hit/ Felt it burnin’ my nose, eyes and lips") that brings a personal context to an event that’s become largely forgotten during the Bush era. And where some battle-rap-bred MCs might relate a childhood growing up broke in the 80s strictly in pop-culture touchstones and throwaway metaphors, "Morning of America" ties in Geo’s childhood memories of Purple Rain, Transformers, and the Cosby Show into the larger, more unsettling era those icons were a distraction to — a time that also saw the Iran-Contra scandal and the hate-crime murder of Vincent Chin.
But the thing that makes Bayani approach tedium is the tone of Geo’s voice itself, so laser-focused on the words at the expense of inflection that it borders on monotony. The chorus of "Back Home"– a call to return our soldiers back from the front– demands a certain intensity for it to resonate, especially with such straightforward phrasing behind it ("We say bring ’em back home/ For my brothers and my sisters who been gone too long/ Saying bring ’em back home/ And I don’t want to have to keep on singing this song"). But he sounds more defeated than defiant, as if he just got a look at the Democrats’ compromised no-timetable Iraq funding bill. It deadens the anthemic potential of a few other cuts, too– "Fire for the People" talks about clenching fists with a tone that couldn’t crack a hard-boiled egg, and the hitches for breath on "Still Got Love" are more noticeable than the conflicted bitterness and frustration over ingratitude that should be powering it. (The chorus does, however, reveal a decent capacity for half-sung cadence.)
Fortunately, whatever force is lacking in Geologic’s voice is largely offset by Sabzi’s beats. His style is packed with dynamic low-end and clean, glossy updates on late-70s/early-80s r&b, drawing on the last ten years’ worth of East Coast and Midwest neo-soul-rap production with strands of the Roots, the Ummah, and Hi-Tek running through. There’s lots of odd and unique little touches that tend to stick out: a hook that could’ve been a straightforward Bill Withers interpolation is hollowed out into a series of truncated syllables; a vocoder bridges the gap between Zapp and fellow Seattleites United State of Electronica; a guitar riff is bent so far out of shape it’s hard to deduce what genre it originated from. Even if the record skews towards the mellow and the downtempo, it sounds better each time you play it — and when that happens with production it usually means the rhyming will grow on you. Even if Blue Scholars are conscious rap’s next great hope more or less by default, Bayani hints that maybe they aren’t as ordinary as they say they are.
Posted to Pitchfork by Nate Patrin on June 05, 2007