You know the pattern by now: An auteur-driven hip-hop album is announced, fans get hyped, a couple of singles leak, the hype escalates, a tracklisting is revealed, the tracklisting is revised, the tracklisting disappears, release dates are hinted at and pushed back, and eventually at some point the thing makes its way into the world a lot later than it needed to. And the end result? An overcooked mess. We've been spoiled over the last couple of years by this nightmarish process' actually resulting in some contemporary classics-- Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Part II and Sir Lucious Left Foot: the Son of Chico Dusty sit up there at the top of the pile-- but for just about everybody else in this position, things have been kind of frustrating.
24 Hour Karate School, Ski Beatz's long-awaited, producer-driven showcase, is one of those unfortunate examples of a vaporware album losing something in the process of actually making it to end-product existence. Heard Mos Def's high-caliber verses on early leaks "Taxi" and "Cream of the Planet"? They're erased from the final release, the tracks reduced to a chassis without a motor. You want a substantial album? Lop off those two aforementioned instrumentals, and the whole thing barely cracks a half hour, all truncated bars and dim spotlights. Oh, and while you were waiting for this record to drop, Ski's other big production job-- Curren$y's ridiculously superb Pilot Talk-- wound up looming a lot larger over it, and its sequel is cresting on the horizon. (Curren$y even shows up on three tracks here, all of which are good but none of which is "Michael Knight" amazing.) From a hotly anticipated epic to the red-headed stepchild of its producer's juggernaut of a year-- that's a disappointing downturn.
Maybe you could blame the lyrical side of the album. Some tracks feature top-of-their-game MCs who don't get enough time to shine: Jean Grae, Jay Electronica, and Joell Ortiz all bust out of the gate on "Prowler 2", but divide three verses by two-and-a-half minutes and things feel a bit rushed no matter how tight the performances are. Some feature unknown quantities who make shaky early impressions-- Rugz D Bewler torpedoing a couple of decent out-of-nowhere verses with a cloying sing-song hook on "Super Bad", and Stalley doing his best to overcome the whole introductory conceit of "S.T.A.L.L.E.Y." with a competent but personality-deficient appearance. And some of the veteran star-power names are underwhelming to the point of disillusioning. When Jim Jones mushmouthily rhymes half his lines with some variation of the word "shit" on "Go" or Camp Lo shrug through a faint Xerox of their vintage intoxicated abstraction on "Back Uptown" (no Saturday Night), it's enough to make you wonder if their verses were placeholders for more thought-out performances that never arrived in time for the album's eventual release.
But there are plenty of salvageable parts here, not the least of which are the beats themselves, evidence enough that this album started as a showcase project rather than just a clearinghouse for misfit remainders. Ski's had a welcome career-extending renaissance as a dude who knows his way around modernized gloss without dulling its edges. He sounds opulent whether he's deploying a Love Unlimited-style horn section ("Nothing But Us"; "Cream of the Planet"), snares-and-synths bionicism ("Do It Big!!", "Super Bad"), or heavy-rock guitar snarl ("Go"; "Prowler 2"; "I Got Mines"). All those styles clash a little when taken in succession, and they don't cohere into much of a bigger whole aside from the shared impact of blunted, 20-story drums, but more 1990s-vet producers should be this adventurous. What we wound up with here is better than having a few scattered ideas sit in limbo on some Skitox shit, and the unofficial "real version" of this album with the restored Mos Def verses isn't that hard to come by anyhow if you know where to find leaks. But when a record spurs more thoughts about what could have been and what's soon to come than an unworried enthusiasm over what actually is, it's probably for the best to just move on.
