#194 Pete Rock - Soul Survivor

Another Kyle rec, who assured me that his rap-filled stuff is better than his instrumental stuff (see #167).

I've started to feel the outlines of a gangta-to-positive scale in hip hop, where the gangta end is far simpler and less pretentious, and the positive end is concerned with being refined and is self-consciously "good", in every sense of the word. Gangta is confident in what it is the the point of obnoxiousness, while positive hip hop sometimes seems desperate for you to like it. I don't like anything that falls too far in either direction, and I simply have no patience for stuff that's too positive (see Digable Planets, esp #78).

I have a long rant about why attitude matters in rap, but in short, you need to think the guys you're listening to are awesome, or the rap listening experience just doesn't work. Some of the positive stuff just comes across as self-conscious, and that's a deal breaker.

This album has a lot of the elements of too-positive rap, the melodic samples, the slightly singsong rapping that comes and goes, the showiness of the rapping. Despite that, it actually largely works for me; there's just enough grittiness in the production, just enough variation, and the rapping is just complex enough. And I actually like its approach to aggrandizing the producer, which as the album itself points out, isn't usually the focus in rap. Its a new variation on the "these guys are awesome" cornerstone.

But my heart just isn't quite in it somehow. It just doesn't quite pull off convincing me it's awesome. Also, I do better when I have one rapper at the helm, I've never loved ensembles with more than two dudes. Maybe I've got the wrong attitude about this, but I ended up feeling like this is at best a 3/5