Three albums and one EP deep, Jurassic 5 have now lasted exponentially longer than any of the old-school South Bronx pioneers they so slavishly imitate. The L.A.-based group, now a quintet after the departure of DJ Cut Chemist, has spent the past ten years recreating the aesthetic of early rap crews like the Treacherous Three and Crash Crew, intricately weaving their voices in and out of each other, finishing each other’s lines, and harmonizing their choruses. It works like a decade-long experiment, an attempt to take forgotten techniques and turn them into 21st-century pop music. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of retro formalism, and a group like the Stray Cats had a nice early-80s pop run doing the exact same thing with a different set of sources. But then, the Stray Cats didn’t write songs about how Def Leppard weren’t true to their art form.
When they’re kicking harmless, meaningless call-and-response cliché, it’s difficult to hate Jurassic 5; there’s an airy, fluid effortlessness to their vocal interplay and a good-natured hamminess to their crowd-pleasing pyrotechnics. But they run into trouble when they start talking about their brand of retro-cheese as the only true form of hip-hop, calling out street-rappers who couldn’t have less to do with them. There’s a discomfitingly conservative and reactionary edge to a line like “They never end that quest for the house on the hill.” It’s a gallingly self-righteous statement from a group with only one rapper (Chali 2na) who manages to project anything resembling a personality. 2na’s commanding, buttery baritone works more often than not but even he isn’t above the occasional numbingly bland line (“You live life; the next part is you die, too/ And there’s no one on Earth that doesn’t apply to”). The other emcees are technically impeccable but thoroughly interchangeable.
The group has been consciously distancing itself from contemporary versions of rap for so long that its not particularly surprising when the only big-name guests on Feedback are the Dave Matthews Band. What’s surprising is that “Work It Out”, the DMB collaboration, is probably the best song on the album, a slow, sunny, weightless jam about how we should all understand each other or whatever with a great growl-sung chorus from Matthews. We’re firmly in G. Love territory here, but it’s gentle and unassuming enough to work beautifully. The album’s other successful songs work pretty much the same way, letting the group’s harmonic tag-team style slow down into a contemplative mutter; the opener “Back 4 U” is laid-back and disarming enough to evoke “Fallin’”, the De La Soul/Teenage Fanclub collaboration from the Judgement Night soundtrack.
But too much of the album either throws the group into truly unflattering contexts (the hyperactive Black-Eyed Peas-esque for-the-ladies nonsense of “Brown Girl”) or returns them to the hamster-wheel formalism they’ve been running into the ground for years now. The group continues to complain about how everyone in rap is after money, but they still can’t seem to come up with anything nearly as emotionally resonant as, say, the Game’s “Like Father, Like Son”. Two separate songs find the group in full-on reminisce-mode, and a few others find the group talking about being the sound of the future while pushing the same throwback pastiches they’ve always done. It would be nice to hear a group like this take the time to sit and wonder why the rappers on the radio are finding fans when they aren’t rather than just bitterly complaining from the sidelines, but I’m not holding my breath.
