The first time I heard Prince Po I was rummaging through a beach side thrift shop and came upon a bunch of De La LPs, a Large Professor 12″, and some other more recognized names in the collegiate feel good hip-hop canon. But when I got home everything except Large Professor’s split I JustWannaChill/ Hard! paled to Organized Konfusion’s 12″. Organized Konfusion EP was odd, it had the intelligence of Prince Paul’s production, but was incredibly angry. I didn’t know there was militant hip-hop this good, and I was miles away from discovering folks like E-40 and others that made hip-hop twice a good as De La but got no cred because they were pissed instead of easing their audiences with humor.
Pharoahe Monch and Prince Po were making music twice as good as the radio, but missing the plays because their records made us white folks feel we’d stumbled into the worst part of the hood and weren’t welcome. If anything Organized Konfusion’s fury seemed real (and potentially threatening) while gangster-rap drew a cartoon of poverty. Since then though Pharoahe’s gone onto a solo career with Rawkus but Prince Po just kinda disappeared. Anyway, leave it to the British to bring back one of hip-hops most intelligent and vocal MC’s for a left leaning album that starts with a tearing violin rip ala La Donna Smith’s Eye of the Storm or maybe the Velvet’s “Black Angel’s Death
Song”. Madlib provides To Much’s strings falling in dark clusters, a little soul at the intro, and a chorus that punches out of the melancholy with pure despair. And maybe that’s what needs to be brought up, perhaps Prince Po has mellowed or perhaps the producers on this album just can’t get that steel tipped uncompromising feel that made Organized Konfusion permanently imprint its signature into your subconscious like a crow bar in the head.
Instead Po makes these melancholy emo rap structures into compromises between his sound and the new one. While Danger Mouse and Jemini’s Ghetto Pop Life flawlessly fused new with new, The Slickness feels like a juxtaposition of the old-school and more vulnerable stuff that marks indie-hop. Hence it misses the challenge of Organized Konfusion, the feeling that your part of something more than just music.
The Slickness is out now on Lex Records.
