Classic And Unappreciated: Latyrx’s The Album

The year’s 1997, and the future’s just starting to sip its second cup of coffee.  Rock’s still reverberating with the echoes of grunge, but its quantum mechanics are oscillating to a mind-blower called OK Computer.  Pop’s gone back to bubblegum in a big way, thanks to The Spice Girls and The Backstreet Boys.  Over in hip-hop, the zeitgeist has glided into a glammier style of gangsta.  Meanwhile, tucked away in an underground Bay Area scene, rappers Lateef The Truthspeaker and Lyrics Born, collectively known as Latyrx, drop an amazing debut LP simply titled The Album, which manages to sound old-school and avant-garde, very much of its time and yet very much against its time.

The Album wastes little time showing off its progressive ambitions as Latyrx introduce themselves, fittingly, with a track called “Latyrx.”  The smoky, sci-fi beat by album co-producer DJ Shadow is menacing and enticing, like a rabbit-hole that leads to an opium-fueled cyber-orgy.  Then Lateef & Lyrics Born barge in and buck your brain like it’s probably never been bucked before.

That’s because Lyrics Born’s flowing through the left speaker and Lateef’s on the right, each one spitting his own separate verse simultaneously.  On paper, “Latyrx” should be a frustrating cacophony, but it’s not.  While both verses are sick enough to warrant unobstructed, single-headphone listens, the song’s far more fascinating when heard as a whole- just tune out the language and surrender to the pure music of the 2 flows phasing and snaking around each other.  (Fun Fact: 1997 was also the year of The Flaming Lips’ 4-disc, multi-stereo experiment Zairkeeka.)

The rest of The Album doesn’t get quite that futuristic, aside from some robotic blips and bloops peppering the margins.  Generally, the remaining tracks are forward-thinking lyrically, but musically, they tend to treasure the traditions of hip-hop’s party-minded golden dawn and pop’s unabashed love of fat, juicy hooks.  Like the gangstas, The Album revels in dusty blaxploitation funk-soul, gloriously simple basslines, and a view that the world can be a dark and slippery realm.  That’s about where the similarities end, though.  Latyrx adapts to the slippery darkness not with crack-slinging and bitch-slapping and cap-popping, but by amping up the positive vibes.  (”Peace and Love and Happiness/ If faced with love, please acquiesce.”)  And yet it still sounds very cool, not terribly hippy-dippy at all. It must be damn near impossible to sound bad-ass when you’re spitting a line like, “love is the room/ and the heart is the entrance,” but Lyrics Born figured out how.  It helps that he has that husky rasp in his throat, and that he has that charismatic dancehall flow he swings into now and then.  But it’s mostly the attitude, all puffed up with bravado- but a sober and respectable bravado.  Macho pacifism.  Like a man who would never start a fight, but if he absolutely had to step to some evil motherfuckers, he would.   (”I kicked the devil in his neck/ without my rosary on.”) The Album’s backlash against gangsta glam is never explicit, and no one ever gets dissed by name.  Yet it’s easy to imagine that some rhymes are aimed at, say, the No Limit crew, or perhaps certain non-Biggie members of Bad Boy.  Take, for instance, the scathing conclusion of Lateef’s second verse in “The Quickening”:

They trying to keep it real, but compared to what?
When there ain’t even no backing to their passing buck
When you skip from the material shit, they get stuck
Trip, they gonna slip, they’re up the creek, in the clutch
All because they really just don’t give a fuck…

If The Album commits any flagrant party fouls, they’re merely matters of sequencing.  One involves track 4, “Balcony Beach,” where Lyrics Born stands before the ocean, letting the rhythm of the waves conduct the tempo of his everyman stream-of-consciousness.  Lyrically, it’s vague and mundane, but everything else on the track makes up for that.  Between Lyrics Born’s charmingly stoned delivery, the intoxicating chill-bro beat, and Joyo Velarde’s seductive, Sade-style hook, “Balcony Beach” is a gem that perfectly encapsulates the state of mind where you leave the party for a moment, go outside by yourself for a quick smoke in the brisk night air, tipsily contemplate your life, and maybe even reach a small epiphany before you go back inside and grab another cold one.  That’s why the song feels so out of place so early on The Album, when the party’s just getting warmed up.

Then smack in the middle of the record, we hear “Funky Granules,” a voicemail to Lyrics Born from his grandma.  Apparently Grandma Born saw something on TV about a doctor (”a psychologist or a psychiatrist or something”) who used rap to help treat troubled kids and try to keep them out of gangs.  “Maybe you can do something on that order, if you’re not already,” grandma suggests.  “Funky Granules” is undeniably amusing, especially for anyone who’s ever received a rambling, well-meaning, semi-oblivious message from an older relative.  Problem is, as the 7th track, it hobbles The Album’s momentum yet again; it would probably work far better as an ironic asterisk at the end of The Album rather than as an interrupting interlude.

Still, even a couple of minor speed bumps can’t tarnish The Album’s majesty.  Thousands of rappers have trumpeted boasts like, “I spit flows that’ll rock past the 21st Century,” the way Lateef does in “The Quickening.”  Unlike Lateef, however, most of those rappers don’t have any records as timeless and evolved as The Album to back up their claims.