Anticon - Music For The Advancement of Hip Hop

"Music for the Advancement of Hip Hop"? Really? With a title that pretentious it had better be the dopest shit ever heard. It starts off promising (if not revolutionarily) with Slug (who I never knew was involved with these guys) throwing back to Rakim's seven mc's and then dropping a pretty tight verse. Unfortunately it's downhill from there. Lofty song titles like "Martyr Theme Song", "Human Races the Tortoise" and "Untitled" can't save the fact that everything done here has been done long before, and with a lot more power and soul, by Ultramagnetic MC's, Organized Konfusion, Divine Styler, Wu-Tang, and plenty of others. Most of the rappers' styles are somewhere between rhythmless and annoying, with a few actually managing to climb both those peaks at once. Dose One obviously thinks he's the most original person to ever "rock the mic", with his wavery delivery and pseudo-English accent whenever he says something "deep", but he's really just the biggest Rammelzee rip-off to ever suck. Sole is inaudible, Buck 65 can't decide if he wants to be Kool Keith or Mykah 9, and the production and subject matter throughout sound like some kid read three paragraphs of Eastern philosophy during a bad trip and decided that rhythm is stupid and they should make a rap group to prove it. There are two good mc's on this album, Eyedea and Slug, neither of whom show up often enough to make a difference, and both of whom later went on to much bigger and better things. Slug is a borderline great mc, one who knows his history, makes throwbacks where appropriate, and, in a breath of fresh air for this album, actually seems to realize he's rapping over a beat. His "Nothing But Sunshine" is by far the best track on the album, and if you haven't heard it you should give it a listen.There is one area in which this album really does make a break from the rest of the hip hop world: a complete lack of hip hop slang and urban imagery. I've got nothing against that, but if taking the roots out of hip hop, ignoring its past and pretending to represent its future, is what passes for "advancement", I'll pass. Supposedly this crew cut their hip hop teeth on battles. Who were they battling, Emily Dickinson's corpse?