Sticking with the theme of East Coast revival. Most specifically keeping with the theme of groups that Fumbling Over Words that Rhyme namedrops. Also, the theme of bands with names that haven't aged well.
Well, this is embarrassing. My West Coast crash course more or less confirmed my preconceptions. There were some deviations: the grooves were cooler, the rapping more compelling, the tropes even more ingrained than I'd realized - but for the most part, it was what I thought it was. But man, these last two albums reveal a huge hole in my rap background. My rapground, if you will. I'm pretty white sometimes.
Once again, this album does stuff I didn't know anyone was doing at the time - intelligent, dense, hyper-technical rapping that's complex and headbobby at the same time. "Positive hip hop" has sort of a stigma attached to it in my mind, evoking rapping that abandons the power of aggressive tone of voice and syllables delivered with force. An important part of rap is its role as rhythm, and when it gets too "positive", sometimes the verbal impact, the actual sound of the words, gets mushy and loses its excitement. This manages to avoid the trap while largely being positive in content and intelligent in tone, splitting the difference even better than the Kool G Rap album. The (MC-helmed) production's hit and miss, but works well enough often enough. I still don't know what the role of 5's are around here, but I was immediately struck that this was really good shit, and that's tough on a first listen, so lets give it up 5/5
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