When Beans' new press photos started making the rounds, depicting him decked out in pro-skier Terminator sunglasses against a hot pink background, a sharp fear plagued me, and some tough questions burned in my mind. Had the former Antipop Consortium rapper/genius gone... electroclash?! And, like, what's going on with the fauxhawk? I refused to believe the future poet had fallen prey to the inflated ego that often comes prepackaged with a solo career-- especially since this guy's former group, Antipop Consortium, helped pull a mostly unwilling leg of hip-hop kicking and screaming into the future by shouting peripheral rhymes through a whooshing holodeck of a recording and strapping it with clicky avant-garde beats. Would Beans really betray us by releasing something... banal?
Well, it's not quite that easy. The beats on Beans' first solo record, Tomorrow Right Now, have wrapped themselves in a bare, futura-glitch of machine hi-hat claps, scratched-out bass, and blurred, trebly kickdrum, with the assistance of Antipop producer E. Blaize. The record is also deeply rooted in electro, but even with that said, it's not nearly what you'd expect. Tomorrow pays homage to the gods of early 80s drum machines in a method consistent with Antipop Consortium: It melds the elements of current hip-hop with the Warp label's signature Powerbook programming. The lyrics belie a certain nostalgia, as with "Mutescreamer"'s lyrical mix of tight, beat-hopping styles, set against a chorus whose cadence sounds straight from a rare Enjoy Records cut, circa 1980. On "Hot Venom", Beans spits, "King Daddy, disco rad/ Totally tubular.../ Y'all need to quit like Nicorette." And with America fully thrust into popular aesthetics of the 1980s, it's debatable whether dropping the words "totally tubular" and showing an affinity for neon is nostalgic or terribly cutting edge.
The single-- and the track in which Beans states his mission of intent-- is the incredibly def "Phreek the Beat", a pared-down mash of island flavor with a true-school-styled lady singing the staccato pre-chorus. Beans sings an easy, dubby boast, declaring himself "the new wave vandal": "So unbelievable/ As a human being nothing holds a candle." It sounds like Roxanne Shante cheerleading Beans into space-- like it was recorded in a vacuum, all clipped and dry and closed-in, a paradox of time where the cadence of Bronx '79 meets the vision of Brooklyn '03. It is Beans' manifesto of ensuring the past's concrete place in his funkyass future.
This is where Beans excels, when the beats are bent and everything sounds like a fresh voice-over on an old episode of Star Trek-- the drifting deep tempo of "Toast", the spiraling, oscillating keyboards of "Hot Venom", the plastic-y, cheese-grater whirls of "Mutescreamer". "Booga Sugar", meanwhile, is a silky-flowed poem in first person about a blunt-addicted rapper who eventually dumps rhymes for a life suckling the crack pipe (Nancy Reagan and her gateway drug pamphlets would have shit her pants for this one), and "Crave" forgoes the future for a jazz-style scat featuring a capella vocals, finger snaps, and simple beatboxing.
On his solo debut, Beans twirls and stretches his language, depicting the life of a poet-rapper, heavy on non-traditional boasts and battle rhymes. But he lacks the gulping, deep tone of former APC cohorts Priest and Sayyid, which means the beats usually usurp his rhymes-- especially on the only halfway-there track "Mearle", where he employs an atonal style of yelling that seems almost disdainful of the listener. He did an excellent job of programming percussion and synth, and throwing unexpected loops everywhere like secret codes. And there's no electroclashing on this record, so that counts for something. Yet, while it sounds extremely fresh right now, I can't help but wonder if, ten years down the road, Tomorrow Right Here will feel as dated as the cardboard backdrops of Lost in Space.
