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UNIQUE, JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE (2005)
I walk to the counter, lay it down. "Hi, how are you today?" says the clerk (or something like that)."Not bad, how are you?" I say (or something similar).
She looks down at the album. Unique, Just Like Everyone Else. Deepspace5, y'all. About eighteen bucks, Canadian. I reach for the Interac card but she interrupts. "Is this, like, hip-hop?" She doesn't know, she just works here.
"Yeah."
"I'll be right back."
She returns with a free sampler with the words "Why Hip Hop?" on the cover. I say "thanks," pay the lady, and leave. DS5 goes in the car stereo; the other album stays in the bag. How good can it be, right? It cost me nothing, and most times you get what you pay for.
But sometimes you don't.
I spent the rest of the ride home listening to the DS5 album, trying to like the simple, experimental and (especially) weird beats from Dust of Mars Ill, and the raps of a crew that rolls ten deep. There's a lot of fuss over this collective, and I want to see what it's about.
If nothing else, the album is surprising. It doesn't compare even remotely to anything I've heard before. Some of the cuts are hot ("Mechanical Advantage," "Half-Hearted," "Cityscaping," and most of the second half of the album) and some are not. It's "hit and miss," but then that's true of most albums. I sit down to write the review and know I should be nice.
But I can't do it. So I let myself cool off, do other things. At some point I pop in Why Hip Hop? and try to drift off to sleep.
I'll state it simply: I like what I hear. It has some filler — a few weak tracks — but the CR crew is clearly on a level most of the recently sprung Uprok Records progeny just aren't on. Yet. They're more polished, a little less original, and not always on their game, and some cats will turn from them for that. But ask me which album I'd have preferred to pay for and I'll tell you: the sampler, all the way.
It's not that Unique... isn't a good album — it truly is, with more than a few songs I'll nod to and play back frequently. Beat Rabbi's production, especially, is top-notch, and the turtablism featured here is out somewhere beyond the ringed planets. There's more good than bad in this set, and I'm not saying hardcore fans won't love it. But a lot of the beats are dead ringers for others, and the same is true of most of the emcees — few truly distinguish themselves.
Why Hip Hop? will appeal much more to the average — the casual — hip-hop fan, but not because it's dumbed down or driven by supposedly evil label execs (Cross Movement has its own indie label). It's just better in many ways.
Given the chance to do it again, I'd still buy ...Just Like Everyone Else. But probably only if I was getting the other album too. As Biggie said, "It's all good." But there are degrees of "goodness," and Why Hip Hop? is a few notches higher, in my view.
- Ben Forrest
September 2005
September 2005
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