Sole's declamations, rapid-fire syllables and message-ramming lyrics-- pounding idea after idea into your head-- make him sound like an inspirational speaker, stalking the hotel conference room stage during some "Confront the 'Baddest Poet' Within" seminar. Maybe I get that image from knowing that Sole is the "business bad boy and catalyst" of the Anticon hip-hop collective, the guy who can count the coins and keep his peers' chins up in the thankless world of underground rapping. He has self-confidence to spare, but knows you've gotta be willing to work for it.
On earlier records like Bottle of Humans and Learning to Walk, Sole varied the pace, taking it easy a few times, but on his new disc he's jogging back and forth, dishing out rhymes thick as weeds, and rapping at a speed that's a half-tick too fast for the average brain to parse comfortably. The lyrics are dense, but they're honest and blunt: he bares himself on this record, to keep with the trademark emotional nakedness of Anticon artists. If you aren't rhyming about hating your family, losing your job or beating off, you might as well quit and hand in your poetry encoding ring (he even slips in his non-MC name "Tim" to lower the mask a little further).
Kicking off with "Da Baddest Poet", Sole fesses up to every cultural crime a white man can commit. He's a slacker ("Jobs ain't nothing but free pens and long distance calls"), a yuppie ("The dog got birth control") and an unrepentant wigger who's "wanted to be black since age fourteen," though lyric for lyric, he harkens more to the Native Americans. Like them, he "learned to eat pain like a sundae snack." We later learn his hairline's receding, though he's only in his mid-twenties; the guy is so honest, he could make his own mirror cry.
Still, you have to break yourself to grow, and you'll never hear Sole drop his self-confident act-- he's cutting himself down just to make himself stronger, and when he's done with that he turns his anger around to the rest of the world: stupid wars, the corrupt politics of fighting terrorism, the thoughtless pursuit of nine-to-five success. Yet the relentlessness is his shortcoming; Sole never stops, slows down or mixes things up, and an hour of this can wear you out. It's too frenetic to have much atmosphere, and it doesn't have the variety of, say, Sage Francis' more intriguing Personal Journals. The beats-- from producers like Odd Nosdam, Jel and Alias-- are good, but not the most exciting or head-expanding work you'll hear from these guys.
Sole never finds a track that just plain kills, like "Famous Last Words" from Bottle of Humans. People take sides between Anticon and Def Jux as if they have some kind of underground East Coast/West Coast rivalry, as if Sole and El-P will face off, call each other "honkey", then run home and write in their diaries. But if it's a free country, would it be fair to prefer Anticon when they record for Mush Records, where the electronic/ambient mood wards off the brash low-fidelity of their own label?
Whether you dig it all or prefer him in small doses, Sole has never sounded more keyed up, heady and on target than he does on Selling Live Water, and its wrap-up is almost anthemic. Ignoring the strangely soft-hitting epilogue "Ode to the War on Terrorism", Sole ends the album with a title track, one that sets off the light show and hammers home his message. He plows through dizzying images of bullshit, laying out career advice, war criticism, slams on "hip-hop nazis" and everyone else who got in his way, or who could ever get in yours. An electric guitar loop soars and the choir kicks in: this is Sole's "You Can't Always Get What You Want". He's taken some blows, the world looks tough and the balance of man and nature is fucked sideways, but he's triumphant, and he owns his future. And he's here to say that you can too.
