If "cool" is making something out of nothing, then classic hip-hop epitomized it. With some scratchy LPs and a gorgeously organic lexicon, rappers hocus-pocused street corners into sovereign states, and transfigured fusty old soul records into musical artillery for sacking the cusp of the millennium. It was the culture in motion at 78 bpm: a panopticon you could pop and lock to.
Rap has come a long way since breakbeats were revolutionary and samples were free. Like any unlegislated grassroots movement, hip-hop created its world piece by piece, and its cosmology could be limited to a city, a borough, a neighborhood, or an urban block. But with its irrefutable cultural ascendancy, hip-hop's wide-open aperture can now snap aerial photos of the entire world and freeze it in mid-spin. It's increasingly feasible that rap-- not rock-- will be the defining music of the American pageant, and like De La said: Stakes is high.
Hip-hop is necessarily conversant with the genres it plunders for its hodgepodge purview. No longer content to scurry out like a bandit in the night, returning with a pilfered string section or bassline, hip-hop now expands its borders from within. Other genres aren't pillaged; they're utterly subsumed. That's why hip-hop is unstoppable: It can contain multitudes, ingest entire solar systems, until, if it continues to its logical conclusion, it will become the mega-genus of which all others are mere sub-categories.
Like any popular genre, rap threatens to slip into ossification, but groups like the sextet Subtle (including core Them members Doseone and Jel) are diligently keeping its frontiers amorphous and supple. You probably want to know what they sound like. But how do you draw a picture of a shapeshifter? After releasing four seasonal EPs, Subtle's debut full-length is an chimera cobbled together from live and programmed drums, electronic strings, keyboards, samplers, guitars, woodwinds, and Doseone's chameleonic flows.
From the throbbing pistons, bursting shards, and diabolical sing-along cadences of "Song Meat", to the Books-ian soundscape and muttered lullabies of "I Love L.A.", to the cracked minor-key glitch-track and hypnotic incantations of "Red, White and Blonde", Subtle remains elusive: It's impossible to draw a bead on an erratically moving target.
Since Doseone has long trafficked in enigmas, it's apt that subtlety both is and is not his modus operandi. On the surface, his bombastic word collages are as subtle as the proverbial bull in the china shop. But upon closer inspection, the rarified air of his understated murmurs, dramatic inflections, crisp enunciation, and striated polyrhythms breathe through earbuds with a rich palette of nuance. On the Doseone continuum, Subtle splits the difference between Them's austere, darkly glittering hip-hop, and cLOUDDEAD's densely layered, pastoral ambient drones. Subtle is not Dose's most innovative or complex project, but by the same token, it may be his most accessible-- a good point of entry into a dauntingly ambitious body of work.
In "The Book of Sand", Borges imagined a book with an infinite number of constantly rearranging pages. The old metaphysician always dreamt of impossible libraries containing the sum total of language, or points in space that enclosed everything in the universe simultaneously. If he were alive today, I like to think he'd find a musical facsimile of his coveted Aleph in Doseone's bottomless oeuvre. While Subtle doesn't contain the endless depths of, say, the first Them album (which I've been listening to for years, and still exhume new wonders from), it's a far cry from punchlines and looped R&B; breaks, an expression of rap's unbounded potential. This is hip-hop as black hole, devouring everything its ever-expanding circumference touches.
