How Big Is Your World? New Raps!

-DJ Quik & Kurupt "Ohh!"

BlaQKout is this year's It Is What It Is, a perfunctory, worker-bee regional rap album that gels together to be way more than a perfunctory, worker-bee regional rap album. The appeal of It Is What It Is was the production, but everybody praised the lyrics. The appeal of BlaQKout is the lyrics and everyone's praising the production. Quik owns the album, for the beats as usual--especially his glitch-hop, rubbery bass, synth/moog handiwork here--but mainly by making a rapper as engaging as Kurupt seem kinda worthless. Quik as 8Ball to Kurupt's Devius, you dig? Quik drops little pieces of earned guidance counselor cornball wisdom ("I used to slang rocks but I was told to stop/Music is your toy...) and insight ("I know the prison system") with the same helium-voiced sincerity he once rapped about "Sweet Black Pussy" and/or his fractured mental state, like the changing for the worse world affects him but he's only gonna let the people really listening to know.

-Mos Def featuring Slick Rick "Auditorium"

"The way I felt-sometimes it's too hard to sit still"--"Auditorium" is like classic Mobb Deep aiming their insights at the geo-political landscape, with a surprisingly uh, good, beat from Madlib that rings and pings and wanders and stomps like a monster from The Infamous too. Big Secret: Black on Both Sides is about as consistent True Magic, which makes Mos a forever-frustrating but always fascinating rapper-turnt-sanger and makes The Ecstatic close to his best release. The way the beat here almost fades-down, then rises out of its quiet with a verse from Slick Rick is probably the best use of a guest since Jeezy dropped down like Bowser in Super Mario 3 into Kanye's "Amazing". "Auditorium" isn't really about anything, but it's not swag-rap or space-shit that don't make no sense either, it's more about a feeling, one perfectly balanced by Mos' paranoid angry collage of comments about the fucked-up world right now and Ricky D's storytelling classicism transported to a warzone.

-G-Side "Paradise"

It was kinda perfect that "Paradise" dropped last week, within a day or two of the previously unreleased video for Kanye West's "Spaceship" because G-Side, of all groups, are picking up what Kanye dropped: A deep concern for community and poverty, with a biting sense of humor ("Santa Claus fuck around, get robbed in our section"). A few lines later ST admits, "Out of state, shit-faced, drunk-textin/My life ain't rosey but I roll with it..." and then powers through the soulful-synthetic beat from Mick Vegas because well, these guys are getting closer to paradise and they can't give up now. On Starshipz, ST and Clova, rapped hard-times flashbacks like they were a part of their present (because they might as well have been and sometimes were) and mixed it with humble thoughts of future-fame ("Run Thingz"). On "Paradise" they're a little closer and you really feel it, especially on Clova's verse (he's the star of this song), where he tempers his of-the-moment flow with a deeper focus on meter and letting every whisper-rap seethe through and echo into the next line--like he's chanting "paradise" into fruition. Note, Clova's humble vision of paradise includes the simple act of "everybody compromising"--this is actual "reality rap", separate from guns and drugs, aimed at the gloomy impossibility for everyone to even just meet in the middle.

-Emynd "What About Tomorrow"

Build-ups stacked on top of more build-ups is the formula for Emynd's "What About Tomorrow". Upward moving synths that could be from any of the electro-Rap & Bullshit dominating radio, percolator drum squeaks tip-toeing around the Club music break, pokes of piano, a weird wave of airy noise (almost like a cymbal struck and echoed then played backward), and the vocal, which comes-in mid lyric, the tail-end of a melismatic wail of "tomorrow-owowoowow" and floats all through the song...There's a lot of influences and ideas flowing through this one, and what makes dance music so cool is how dopes like me can expound on it for hundreds of words but none of that really stops it from just being beyond-words awesome (or not awesome as is sometimes the case, thought not this time)--Club music just sorta works like that.

-James Ferraro "Steel Escape"

Madlib's "Auditorium" beat born with mosaicism. Would've never have checked this out if not for Justin Broadrick's Twitter because Ferraro belongs to that whole sub-genre on the, "now that Holy Mountain's easily available on DVD, and I bought a book of Alex Grey artwork at Borders, trippy, cornball spirituality's available for me to grossly misread" tip, but this guy really gets it. Taking his cues from Commodore 64 and Italian zombie films soundtracks as much as transcendent Lamonte Young drone or even Terry Riley's mannered trippiness, there's real tension and menace in Ferraro's work. This isn't the best track on Edward Flex Presents: Do You Believe In Hawaii?--that would be "Chrome Wave Arena", the thirty-minute track that starts off with manipulated seal yelps--but "Steel Escape" is the shortest and works as a primer for the rest of the album which stretches the moaning, warm synths on some 70s film-strip shit and pond of manipulated voices and gutteral groans heard here into humming, fart-noise, synth-bliss epics.