As Kool A.D., Victor Vazquez is a rapper whose best lines are often other rappers' best lines, repurposed, or nonsense that sticks in your head because its fun to say. He raps like a very talented, very spacey member of a cipher, always on the verge of losing the thread of his freestyle but never particularly worried about it. His style is culled from relatively obvious influences, including Cam’ron’s internal rhymes and joy in language and Lil B’s daring absurdity.
His new record, Word O.K., is an album of post-modern rap, a self-conscious, fourth-wall-breaking word collage that parodies hip-hop’s grand narratives even as it gleefully fulfills them. After deconstructing rap on his 2012-2013 “Bus Route” tapes, which were short bursts of Bay Area-influenced conceptual experimentation and genre cuts, the new album is a sign that Vazquez is returning to Das Racist's own knotty style. The songs here are longer, more difficult to characterize, than his recent work; he's not claiming to be a series of arbitrarily chosen celebrities anymore or mumbling stream-of-consciousness lyrics over guitar licks. The ambition showcased on Word O.K. makes for a more fluid project than anything that Vazquez has come out with since 2012's The Palm Wine Drinkard, but it also dials down the enigmatic quality of his recent work. He had once committed to the “anything goes” sensibility of his music, but now Vasquez is hedging his bets, unsure of whether or not to shoulder the mantle of contributing seriously to the genre he so clearly loves.
Vasquez's love of rap and wordplay, if nothing else, is what comes through strongest on Word O.K.: as he says early on, he “Speaks the English language/ That's the slang I learned to bang with/ If I came from Denmark then I’d probably freak the Danish.” It’d be hard to come up with another rapper who takes such simple joy in rhyme, and Vazquez remains a pure pleasure to hear flipping words, even as he mocks his own ability to do so. Several times throughout the record he throws shade at his own rapping, noting his semi-amateur status (‘“Sometimes I get paid to record…other times I do it for free”) and lack of concrete subject matter (“This is just me bullshittin, I ain't got shit to say”). Most of the tension on the record comes from the difference between that attitude and sentiments like the one on “Naughty by Nature”, on which Vazquez claims to “Just want to write real raps/ Like, tell ‘em how you feel raps," before undermining himself again by describing a boatload of other jokey types of raps that he’d like to write.
Throwing this many words at a canvas typically makes for interesting material, and on Word O.K. Vasquez occasionally says something interesting. On the seven-minute exploration “Life and Time”, he talks about the pain that comes with seeing misery in the world, shrugging “What can one man do?” before self-correcting: “I don’t know, probably a lot.” It’s a thought-provoking questioning of the artist’s priorities. Unfortunately, as with so many other similar sentiments on this record, there’s no follow-through, as the train of thought is abandoned as soon as it arrives.
Ultimately, Word O.K. is held together by longtime collaborator Amaze 88's beats, as well as production from Mike Finito and Toro Y Moi's Chaz Bundick; the latter's throwback hip-hop contributions to “The Front”, especially, helps the song stand apart as one of the record's most diverting cuts. For his part, Amaze comes through, as his blissed-out West Coast loops on “Open Letter,” “Life and Time”, and the title track provide firm foundations for Vazquez's random blocks of thought.
Word O.K. is compelling art, but it's also weightless, shifting, defiant music that rejects the listener’s ability to gain something from it. Since he's cloaked his more serious self in an armor of dense wordplay, it’s difficult to determine whether Vasquez has a goal other than throwing words on wax and seeing what sticks, a method that shields him from his own seriousness and prevents him from further exploring bigger ideas.
