Hip-hop is a single-driven medium. Just like Rock 'n Roll used to be until, I dunno, the mid-to-late-sixties. Even with three decades of excellent, artistically unified hip-hop albums, the genre still runs on short, compelling stabs of innovation (and, sometimes, moronic novelty and lowest-common-denominator vulgarity... not that innovation and vulgarity are mutually exclusive). This is why, say, Tyler the Creator is still super important even though his album is an uneven, indulgent mess that would have made a really excellent EP. The visceral thrill and sonic challenge of "Sandwiches" are so important that it's almost like "Boppin' Bitch" never happened. Almost.
Anyway. As with most genres, hip-hop innovation is a bottom-up proposition, with underground artists churning out dense, challenging work so sonically extreme it borders on the avant-garde. These ideas then either win their creators a shot at the mainstream brass ring, or they get strip-mined by creeps like P. Diddy and Will. I. Am. Either way, broke and hungry motherfuckers drive the artistic development that allows rich assholes to make Rolling Stone year-end lists, and if anyone can find a credible example of top-down progression in hip-hop, I have a particularly delicious-looking hat I am prepared to eat.
The upshot of all this is that, due to bad luck or excessive weirdness or old-fashioned ugliness, there's an almost infinite supply of really AMAZING rap singles that never reached anything like mainstream consciousness. And "Slick Talkin" is a PRIME example.
A showcase for PCP-addled New Jersey MC Tame One, "Slick Talkin" appeared in a SEVERELY (one minute, forty-five seconds) truncated version on Tame's debut solo album, When Rappers Attack. THIS version, which was buried at the exact center of a "mix CD" from a rap crew (The Weathermen) that only a handful of surly white kids liked, features an additional verse by Breeze Brewin (formerly of the Juggaknots) and clocks in at a much more satisfying 2:24.
The beat is by producer/rapper/curmudgeon/author J-Zone, and if he's ever done anything better than this, you all need to cram it in my ears RIGHT NOW. We open with the sound of thunder and a sort of typewriter/freight-train noise that will be percolating in the background for the whole song. Tame give shout-outs to J-Zone and DJ Mighty-Mi, there's an ascending synth squeal, and we're off to the races.
Some sort of far-eastern stringed instrument (a shamisen, maybe?) gets looped to the point of dizzying abstraction, a classic boom-bap beat drops, and a CRUSHING bass tone keeps pulsing out on the first off-beat of every other measure. The track is queasy and punishing and relentless and awkward at the same time, claustrophobic despite the vast amounts of space it contains...
And Tame One starts to rap. "The dark-skinned Christopher Walken/Slick talkin'/Out in the bricks flossin'/T-shirt ripped off and/Wrapped around my head like it's a turban/Drinkin' Hennessy Bourbon/Cursin' all over the Clean Version". And on. And on. AND ON. And then, as suddenly as it started he's tossing you in the Passaic River and talking about White Castle. It's here that the album version abruptly cuts off, which is too bad, because the Breeze Brewin verse is a cool wind after the furnace blast we just experienced. It's nimble, clever ("I start with an open mind/But let me get vexed/I start with a peace sign/But quickly dead the index"), and, while excellent, it's mainly a nice come down from how stunning that Tame verse was.
This brings me to an important point about Rap Lyrics: They Are Not Poetry. Not necessarily. The function of a rap lyric is to be PERFORMED, and performed WITH A BEAT. Breeze's verse is, I would argue, more satisfying as poetry than Tame's. The rhyme scheme is more challenging, the metaphors are less obvious. It features some compelling uses of alliteration and is intellectually light years ahead of Tame's "Street team full of weed fiends that'll merk you". And yet, Tame's verse fucking BURIES this shit. This is because it fits perfectly into the empty spaces the beat creates. It's thick with menace and swagger. If it's dumb, it's IMMACULATELY dumb.
Look, I'm not trying to get you to run out and buy any Tame One albums (even though he's got a couple good ones, his recent work makes me think the PCP has finally cooked the part of his brain that did the rapping), but I wanted you all to hear this. It's a GEM, and there's more where that came from. Shit, there's probably some kid making one RIGHT NOW. And that's why I love hip-hop.
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