Dropping knowledge is good. Pedantry, lecturing listeners and telling them what to think is bad. Those poles make up two sides bisected by a thin line, which Homeboy Sandman straddles for the entirety of his first LP with Stones Throw, First of a Living Breed. Sand is one of the best pure lyricists around, and Stones Throw seems like a natural fit. It's the perfect place to get the kind of beats that a rapper like him thrives over-- glitchy, sideways drumlines and soul-infused sunbeats, phenotypes emerging fully-formed from the masters at Stones Throw's HQ.
But when Sand starts grandstanding on a song like "For the Kids", it's truly a waste. This is the song that Fred Rogers would have made, had he invested time in a hip-hop side project. I wish I could say that the tribute to Whitney Houston that starts the song off is tongue-in-cheek, but it's followed by such banal advice as quit smoking cigs and "go study for a quiz," "you're not an ugly duckling, you're a swan," and "the object of life ain't makin' bucks."
There's no problem with making a positive song. But there's a massive problem with making a song that's entirely comprised of advice that kids have heard a thousand times before, without even switching up the phrasings. There's only one way I can imagine this track getting any play with its target audience: in the eventuality that some desperate parents try to show their kids that hip-hop can be fun and healthy, they will no doubt turn to "For the Kids". And lessons like that turn kids on to metal.
Songs like "For the Kids" and the similarly useless "Cedar and Sedgwick" are aggravating because Homeboy Sandman is capable of so much more. When he takes a topic between his teeth and chews it, there are few rappers who can compete. In the past, on songs like "Angels with Dirty Faces" and "Mean Mug", Homeboy has taken topics as serious as homelessness or as innocuous as a scowl and constructed powerful lessons around them. These meditations were all the more puissant for the fact that the rapper seemed to be exploring them for the first time himself-- he was guiding, rather than lecturing.
Thankfully, there are plenty of songs on First of a Living Breed on which Sandman bats a topic around like a hyper-intelligent cat professor*,* seemingly confident that his students will learn something from watching the yarn unspool*.* The most casually impressive of these is the pretty piano-rap track "Couple Bars (Honey, Sugar, Darling, Sweetie, Baby, Boo)". Though it's ostensibly a pick-up song in the classic mold, Sand's slow, heavily-enunciated lyrics make for observations that are at least as amusing as a simple "Ay babay."
Lines like "I don't know if you are into sports but I am hoping so," (which comes after a Robinson Cano reference) are charming in their odd formality, and when Sand digresses, he's often pretty damn funny. "Wish I was your articles of clothes, just a particle of cotton on your cones, that'd be the most wonderful destiny ever, only possibility possibly better than being a stich on your sweater is being human and me and you together," he raps, internal rhymes going blammo. But the best part of the song is it's logical conclusion. After being so weird ("I've got you under my skin, nothin' fungal"), and going on for so long about the perfection of what turns out to be a perfect stranger, Sandman thanks the lady in question for "inspiring a hot record" whether or not she wants to take a walk with him. And therein lies the simplest of lessons: Do you, and don't sweat the response. If you're funny, that'll help.
Sandman takes on a host of more serious topics with the song "Illuminati", one of the best political rap tracks in a year positively writhing with them. Creeping production by J57 highlights the importance of listening closely, as Sand spits indisputable truth. On a song that goes as deep as this, and with my limited word count, it's best to just pick out some highlights. "Every man is not created equal, we're all created mad different, some are bad people." "Think [cops] are tapping your computer, your computer is a tap." "The war on drugs has been goin' on for awful long, folks married to the game instead of dating off and on." "We used to beat on Bush but now he's not around so people found a different bush to beat around." Though the song doesn't necessarily have a clear subject, its dual messages are simple: Don't believe what you're told and think hard.
"Show, don't tell," is the oldest, most clichéd writing advice ever, the kind of overused aphorism that I'd expect Homeboy Sandman, on one of his off-days, to spit in a song called "For the Writers". And yet, the difference between his good songs and his bad songs on this album is the difference between showing and telling. The brilliant writing on First of a Living Breed (along with songs mentioned above, there's the sunny, Oddisee-produced "Watchu Want From Me?", album opener "Rain" and exotic "The Ancient") would position the album as a candidate for one of the year's best rap records if it weren't for those drawback tracks. As it is though, we'll have to take this one as a compromised effort, and hope that, next time out, Homeboy Sandman can avoid taking us places to which we've been before.
