| Before you die, you need to hear Busdriver. Alright, so that's a massive overstatement. But before you claim to know hip-hop, before you say you've heard everything the culture has to offer, before you give up on emcees altogether, you need to hear Busdriver. At least, if you're about to be so bold, you better have heard him, because the man is unlike anyone else in the game - and it's fair to say that no one will ever fill his exact niche. And he knows this. Quickly summarized, Busdriver is a virtuoso of syllable arrangement - probably the premier fixture of the trade - with an impressively sneaky vocabulary and a stunning penchant for packing multiple rhymes into awkward meter. Needless to say, his uncompromising grasp of the lexicon, combined with his physical ability to rip through verbiage like a buzz saw on rocket fuel, produces verse that would best be described as baffling. Of course, the scattered nonsensical tirades only bolster Busdriver's immediately illusive quality - they also help a person label the emcee "abstract" when pigeonholing becomes necessity. And it's those hasty interpretations that have Busdriver boiling - well, hasty interpretations, scene posturing, and the underpinnings that make for a record "business," all have him miffed a bit. In this respect, Fear of a Black Tangent is at least a little enlightening, assuming you're able to decipher the content buried beneath the flustering elocution. This is one emcee's account of what sells records, and the same emcee's frustrated search to understand what sells art. The album starts out on a lyrical high note, with "Reheated Pop!" a brief rant about how dying prematurely in Busdriver's occupation is a great way to reduce oneself to a name, take that name to all kinds of exciting places, and make lots of money for other people. From that point on he gives us some random hipster dissing, some chat about inflated egos, and many expressions of rational disgust in the scene at-large. But it's on "Happiness('s Unit of Measurement)" that he so effectively gets into the dilemma of being misunderstood in a predictable medium. "Is this it?" Busdriver blurts, "Since it's Fear of a Black Tangent, do I gotta call white kids devils? / Or do I gotta say 'nature's ovaries are bleeding' at a poetry reading?" Is it any more impressive that he effortlessly lets these lines loose in less than four seconds? Well... yes. In case this review has, thus far, been somehow ambiguous about Busdriver's appeal, let's just be blunt about it: Busdriver raps really fast. But he doesn't just rap fast, he raps with a staggered momentum that makes his verses seem like the spontaneous venting of mad genius; at one point sounding like a zealot desperately trying to overcome bradyphasia, in a split second becoming an erratic (though extremely controlled) motormouth. - 30 Music |
1XLP/Out Of Print