All respect to Northern State, the three-piece white-girl rap group named after Long Island's Northern State Parkway, which runs through their hometown. Half Hollow Hills High School West schoolmates, they became Northern State via a 2003 demo that became an EP that became the full-length Dying in Stereo. They garnered Beastie Boys comparisons for being Jewish, New Yawk, and white, and for jacking the same freeform, call-and-response sense of rhythm (and humor) from the Funky Four plus One. But where the early Beastie Boys were barely-educated teenagers more interested in Led Zeppelin's groupies than they were their fellow man, Northern State followed the lead of their fellow Nassau County natives Public Enemy and rapped about who they voted for in the 2000 presidential election. They did not have mic skills as skills have been defined in hip-hop post-Rakim; and you got the acute sense they didn't listen to much hip-hop post-Beastie Boys. To this site, their combination of liberal university politics and retrograde microphone technique was so obvious as to be offensive, and in response reviewer Michael Idov gave Dying in Stereo a score two tenths of a point less than one.
Like Luscious Jackson, their 1990s predecessors as New York's designated female Beastie Boys protégées, Northern State exposed hip-hop as a form as adaptable to whiteness and the suburbs as it was to countrywide worsening urban conditions and rising rates of black incarceration. This is something people who've grown up with rap music know without being told. That Northern State were basically bad rappers-- as were Luscious Jackson when they tried, and as is, say, Uffie or any number of other downtown-affiliated mic testers-- was only one of the many signs that they weren't really rappers at all.
On the four-tracked Hip-Hop You Haven't Heard demo/EP/album teaser, there was the shock of them spitting so sincere ("Twice they boast about their 'optimism,' and I love them for putting it so literally," wrote Robert Christgau) and the pleasure of parsing the personas: the ringleader Hesta Prynn; Spero, gently foulmouthed; Sprout, DJ and chief beatrider. Major label leap All City toned everything but the sincerity down, including the punchlines, and the hyper-audible enthusiasm that carried the whole enterprise sounded more like queasy confidence. They copped more expensive production and as a result didn't really sound like themselves, and they were the ones everyone liked in the first place.
Three years later they're out of their Columbia contract, Adrock's behind the boards (alongside Shitake Monkey's Chuck Brody), and their third full-length is titled Can I Keep This Pen? The phrase comes from posse-cut "Mother May I?", on which the three MCs trade lines and smack syllables, nodding at the proto-rap that birthed them. "Complex times call for complex rhymes ya'll," says Prynn, "A lime to a lemon yo a lemon to lime." Elsewhere Sprout raps "Forget the thruway, cause we rep the parkway." On "Sucka Mothafucker" they shout out global warming: "Got a brand new car shoulda bought the hybrid/ Cause you could afford it and I wish that I did/ Change your mind and all that you stand for/ Put Obama in your life and bring back Al Gore." Not clear enough for you? Try "Mothatfucka"'s massively off-key bridge, where the three of them warble "This one's going out the Dem-o-crats/ 2004 ya'll came real wack/ But now that we got some real can-di-dates/ Can we please come correct in 2008?"
That Northern State will interrupt a beatdown on malt-liquor drinking fake-gangsters from Weehawken in order to endorse political aspirants is not news. More startling is the fact that nearly a full half of their tracks-- "Better Already", a Bloodhound Gang-sounding anthem about how much they like each other, and "Good Distance", a Breeders-esque seether-- take Luscious Jackson's eclectic indie-alt template as their own, sinking the beat amid pulses of synthy guitar. And they sing more than ever: on single "Away Away", on the electro-clash bouncer "Cold War", and on the slow-jammed "Run of the Road", which could have been written by TLC.
A lot of things going on here, then, often at the same time. No coincidence that Northern State's profile has been highest in New York and in rock critic circles-- elsewhere, people can't relate. And anyone with a stake in hip-hop over the last twenty years will notice how rarely Northern State do right by a genre from which they borrow so freely. Calling them wack MCs isn't saying much though-- they're the only MCs of their kind, competing only against themselves. No wonder they make music that sounds like it was made in a void: heart in the right place, perforated with off-key singing and C-grade rapping. Who could do their thing better?
