My long-running feud with 9th Wonder's wet-waxpaper snares is now officially dead and buried. From now on, whether it is true or not, I will weave into my moral fiber the belief that he is a shepherd of the club nouveau of punk ethos hip-hop-- fueled more by intention than skill. He produced every track on Murs' last album, Murs 3:16, which I liked, and every track on the follow-up Murray's Revenge, which I like nearly as much.
After a year in which the trap-hop/coke-rap contingent ground the internets to dust, I can appreciate a record that does not contain one nigga, bitch, faggot, brick, time served, or clip emptied, and still is not a steaming mess of defanged braggadocio about commitment to the four elements. There is a limit on both sides, and Murs seems to have found the median where he can talk about himself without sounding self-absorbed. He speaks on topics as varied as racial identity ("Dark-Skinned White Girls"), a nice fade ("Barbership"), and fidelity ("Love & Affection") with a charming aplomb weaned equally on (old) Death Row and the Good Life Café, both of which were not far removed from his home section in the Mid-City area. Similar to the Kanye-hyped Lupe Fiasco, Murs is an artist whose appeal is grounded in his honesty about not being a gangster even though he grew up around some. He calls out fake thugs not with accusations of hip-hop treason or murderous threats but a challenge to a gentlemanly fistfight, describes South Central as not all that bad, doesn't have a chain because his mom would have killed him, and boasts about his prowess like a modern-day Positive K. He's even tempered some of the misogyny that made bits of 3:16 non-Mom-friendly, though he is not yet to Common levels of Millennial Man gender equity.
Murs may not inspire myspace shrines like Slug or blog jack-offs like Ghostface, but he's once again made a record that should not alienate fans of either. Maybe that makes him the Broken Social Scene of hip-hop, I don't know, but with the kind of production from 9th Wonder that seems to improve when removed from the comforts of Little Brother, Murray's Revenge is one of the better gang-unrelated and Dre-unaffiliated records to come from the West Coast since Murs' last one.
