HUNDRED STRONG feat ASPECTS – Paranoia
HUNDRED STRONG feat GRANDMASTER GARNER & BEANZ OBE – Prayer
HUNDRED STRONG feat OBSCURE DISORDER & A-TRAK – Superior Raps
HUNDRED STRONG feat ASPECTS – Transcontinental
(all from the LP “Hundred Strong – Strength of a Hundred”)
A slightly belated return to the hip-hop debate which infected this blog about a week ago and which I must plead guilty to having instigated. This album is determinedly “undie” – released on the UK’s ultra-hip Hombre label – and as such, many of the production values are somehow “grainy”, almost “smoky”, with old-skool samples, scratching etc. throughout. Six months ago, this was the sound I chose unequivocally. Even now, it’s still my preference, but I’m beginning to open myself more to the incredible physicality, the unrelentingly horrible sonic assault course, that DMX et al have thrown into the mainstream. Something of me would love to like street rap’s distancing of itself from the music’s past (DMX ultimately has more in common with Black Sabbath than he does with any hip-hop from 15 years ago) and I think I would if the emceeing was more skilled.
The emceeing here is on point throughout the album, but there are times where you feel the production’s pushed down, forced endlessly back to earth by its clearness and lack of embellishment. The highlights here are “Paranoia” and “Prayer”, the best production (respectively, slow-draining piano-led funk, and halfway between a bassline and a cry) and the sharpest lyricism anywhere here (the Aspects mention the year 1893 in “Paranoia”, which admittedly makes it easy prey for a historically-obsessed cultural magpie like myself). “Superior Raps” is more thuggish than anything else here and, perhaps unsurprisingly, has the deepest reverberation of the bass, and “Transcontinental” has an effortless swagger. But elsewhere you feel as though it’s getting lost in an imagined past of “real” music, “solid” funk – the instrumental Al Green feel of “Headz Instrumental” and the orchestral “Hundred Strong Outro” are unhealthily assimilable by the dreaded Macy Gray industry.