For more than 20 years, DJ Quik has been the secret ingredient in the broth. Whether you know it or not, the gifted West Coast producer/rapper has worked on dozens of L.A. gangsta rap classics you've drunkenly screamed along to, often without even a liner-note credit to show for his efforts. Pop music's grumbling cast of neglected innovators is long, but Quik doesn't quite fit with that crowd: He's released platinum and gold records, as well as helped craft them for Tupac, Snoop, and Dre. Instead, he's stuck in that weird purgatory between Unknown Legend and Not-Quite-Star. It's a situation that could bog you down if you let it. But if you decide, one day, that you simply do not care anymore, something amazing can happen: You realize you can do whatever the hell you want.
This realization has been dawning in real time in DJ Quik's music recently. On BlaQKout, his 2009 collaboration with fellow West Coast warrior Kurupt, he experimented with stylistic detours from electro to dub, letting his free-associative musical imagination run wild. On the surface, The Book of David feels more straightforward. A rich stew of warm disco, grown-and-sexy R&B, and classic g-funk, it sounds engineered to waft out over barbecues. But it's also riddled with idiosyncrasies: songs that dissolve into deep-dub fade-outs, vocal samples that pop up in unexpected places, astonishing statements of raw heartbreak and anger. It's as weird as it is crowd-pleasing, and it underlines what BlaQKout suggested: Unencumbered by commercial expectations, Quik is making some of the most inventive music of his career.
Quik has always been quirkier than his gangsta-rap peers-- underneath the monstrous knock of his drums, he's snuck in all manner of odd little details. On The Book of David, though, he's a full-blown mad scientist of trunk-rattle. "Fire and Brimstone", the album's opening track, lurches out of the gate with a stumbling drum pattern. It's a pulverizing track that could transform a passing Jeep into a noise-disturbance complaint, but it's also a sprawling grid of counter-rhythms oddly similar to the rhythmic map of Radiohead's "Bloom". (Seriously.) "Poppin'", meanwhile, feels like a random collection of unrelated sounds accidentally colliding to form a perfectly coherent groove.
If any of this sounds wonky or cerebral, don't worry-- The Book of David is a pleasure-first listening experience, and Quik deploys each of his tricks with a showman's flair. "Hydromatic" loops an intoxicating vocal sample around some bone-jarring piano stabs and New Orleans brass-band blurts, and that's before the head-spinning syncopated hand-claps glide in. "Killer Dope" rolls in on a regal fanfare of French horn pads and jazz-inflected pianos. On that song, Quik brags about his ability to simultaneously rhyme and play his piano live; it's a telling boast, revealing the old-school funk producer Quik is in his heart. On The Book of David, you feel his keen musical intelligence-- and his humble pride in his talent-- presiding.
Most rapper/producers struggle to be as memorable on the mic as they are in the booth, but not Quik. On BlaQKout, he effortlessly lapped frowning technical lyricist Kurupt, and given a sprawling 70-minute album to hold down, he makes for durably fascinating company. His word choices-- meticulous and hilarious-- land somewhere left of your expectations, making him the most vivid presence on each song he's on. "I got wordplay acumen/ And I've had it since you was in grade school watchin' the janitor vacuumin'," he informs us on "Babylon". When he doles out insults, it's with a sense of school-teacherly calm (he's "a dignitary, you're a lowly beggar," he says on "Fire and Brimstone"), and even when Quik summons true venom, his voice never rises above the level of casual conversation.
Most of that venom on The Book of David is directed, as it has been for most of his career, at an intimate place: his own family. "Ghetto Rendezvous" ("I hate you so much it just shows/ I hate you more than Michael hated Joe") is directed to his own sister, whom he almost did 10 years in prison for pulling a gun on when she allegedly tried to kidnap his children. It's a horrific story, the kind of dirty laundry some rappers would air as a perverse badge of honor (see: Game, The). But Quik has no interest in battering us with his personal pain; he just wants to tell us about it. So he slips it in easily among the boasts, the jokes, and the party jams. In that way, David mimics the texture of real life-- jokes and confessions, partying and pain, all mixed up together.
The Book of David emanates this decidedly zen confidence and ease at every level. Quik has a lifetime's worth of career relationships and unlimited lines of credibility to draw on, but he shows zero interest in crowding his tracks with guest-verse favors called in from his more famous friends to wiggle closer to the mainstream. The features on David-- relative no-names like Jon B., BlaKKazz K. K., local legends like Suga Free, over-the-hill West Coast rappers like Ice Cube and Kurupt-- are his compatriots, people he's worked with for years, and they slot into his overall work exactly as he sees fit. When you've exerted the kind of unacknowledged influence on your art form that Quik has, bitterness can take hold easily. But Quik has chosen a wiser route: He's created a tiny island on which he is king.
