WEDNESDAY'S REVIEW: LYRICS BORN

Lyrics Born "Everywhere At Once" (Anti-/Quannum Projects)

So this is why Lyrics Born was put on the earth: Not to be the teddy bear of hip-hop's neo-classical underground, but to be a pop monster. The musicality of 2003's excellent Later That Day was only a taste of the full-fledged funk on Everywhere At Once, and if the Oakland rapper/singer/producer has any ambitions of being admired as a poet, he's doing a horrible job of keeping his grooves out of the way. Mr. Born is now officially a capital-S songwriter and a capital-H hookmaster, and Everywhere At Once (minus a skit or two) proves to be uniformly taut; the tunes give nods to the titans (Clinton, Prince, James, Chic, Cameo, Dre), but without accruing the flab that can develop when any West Coaster decides to dial back the BPMs while warming up the bass. Beatwise, I'm partial to the whistle-accented "Hott 2 Deff" (despite the superfluous Chali 2na cameo) and the contempo-club "The World Is Calling," but those tracks are only marginally superior to the surrounding hits-in-the-making. In his enthusiasm, Born does get corny at times, particularly on the booze-cruise-ready "Top Shelf," but he's also pitch-perfectly snarky on "Do U Buy It?" -- a track that has no future on mixtapes but has enough New Wave bite to make a great video. "They say the best things in life are free/And the second-best things are legal and cheap/Gimme more, gimme more, gimme more, gimme more/All you had was a headache, now you have a disease," he sings in a monotone, like a long-lost zombie follower of Jello Biafra. Elsewhere on the album, Born usually has enough feel-good/feel-smart lyrics to fit the grooves -- even if the grooves totally dominate everything they touch.

Previously: Shelby Lynne | The Stance Brothers | Kokayi | The Sword | Fuck Buttons | Cadence Weapon | Paul Oakenfold

Comments

[Jorge Banales]

"Do U Buy it?" Reminds me of Fun Boy Three.