(04.06.05)
Busdriver, one of the free-style MCs rising out of Los Angeles-based
Project Blowed crew, approaches hip-hop with a sardonic sense of humor
and a wry eye for the realities of the 21st century music business.
Fear of a Black Tangent, his latest release on Mush, is filled
with gentle electronics, deft string arrangements and acoustic
melodies — musical accompaniment that supports his verbal barbs
instead of burying them beneath a layer of ass-rumbling sub-woofer
thunder. Busdriver has a delightfully self-depreciating style that,
instead of talking smack about others, draws our attention to the
ludicrous and surreal nature of the music business.
Over a child-like voice that sounds like Dido channeling one of The
Chipmunks and a pair of acoustic guitars, Busdriver lays into the
system that calculates worthiness by record sales in “Happiness (‘s
Unit of Measurement).” “I’ve got a point system that determines my
happiness’s / Its unit of measure is your interest in my crappy shit
… A business risk you know having a quality end product should be
the rule of thumb / Fix the shit, but it’s obvious the culture’s been
raped, it lies in a pool of cum.” There are no rewards for the clever
and the skilled; it’s just a system that rewards the facile and
shallow. “I’ll be a jiggy jiggabo / Who goes through laser
hair-removal if it means that I could pay my rent and other bills.”
Busdriver freely wheels between jazz licks (“Wormholes”) to slumbering
chamber music (“Map Your Psyche”), sharing the MC spotlight with
fellow Project Blowed MCs Abstract Rude, Ellay Khule, Mikah-9 and
2Mec. The production behind his tongue-twisting raps is tight, a
construct that provide counterpoint to his start-stop rhythms (think
break-beat laid down by dialogue instead of a series of software
patches), and features Daedelus, Danger Mouse, Omid and Thavius Beck
working behind the scenes. While the guest stars and production staff
give the record a certain pedigree, it is Busdriver’s coy whiplash
linguistics that make Fear of a Black Tangent both wincingly
entertaining and gently poignant. He is, as he drops on us in “Cool
Band Buzz,” a “necromancer of an exquisite corpse.” Yes, it trips by
so quickly and so jaggedly that it smacks of stream of consciousness
and sprightly surrealism, but Busdriver’s just got highly active brain
cells firing in his head. “I’m constantly probed by the weak and the
dull / With poor and boring things asked / I’ll put a breach in the
hull of their exploratory spacecraft / With oratory weight mass.”
There’s a whiff of T. S. Eliot in “Low Flying Winged Books,” a song
that is a hip-hop re-imagining of Peter Gabriel’s “Excellent Birds.”
Busdriver is Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, caught on the stair, asking
“Do I dare?” Lost in the linguistic glory of language, tantalized by
the persistent pulse of a drum loop, and unerringly accurate with his
barbs, Busdriver fights the system with a wry smile that hides sharp
teeth. The stiff lines of our black and white world need more
tangents.
Fear of a Black Tangent is out now on Mush.
