If you're over 30 and jaded, there's a good chance your favorite producer in the hip-hop game right now is 9th Wonder. Being part of that particular demographic isn't necessarily a requirement for enjoying his best work, however-- particularly Murs' Murray's Revenge, Jay-Z's Black Album sleeper track "Threat", the temporarily-shelved Jean Grae collab Jeanius. (It probably helps a bit for Little Brother's The Minstrel Show, though.) 9th's main strength is taking the heavy soul-jazz boom-bap vibes of prime Pete Rock and updating them just enough so that they evoke 1992 instead of sounding like remnants of that age, and considering he does the bulk of it with Fruity Loops and a modest budget, the results are frequently impressive.
But often times, 9th's music exists not just as art but as a preservationist impulse-- one to soundtrack true believers' longing looks backward. "To tell you the truth I didn't have that 18-year-old in mind," he told artofrhyme.com in a recent interview discussing The Dream Merchant 2. "I had my peers in mind. I'm 32 and my peers range from everybody from 28 up to 39. So that was the sound or whatever I wanted to go for." The presumption that a teenager wouldn't be interested in a record like this is emblematic of Dream Merchant 2's problems. It's a record that spends most of its length preaching to the converted, complacent in the idea that evoking years past in a deeply personal and nostalgic way is enough to sustain an album rather than simply providing a starting point to elaborate on. Best-case scenario, you get tracks like the Mos Def/Jean Grae/Memphis Bleek cut "Brooklyn in My Mind", which picks up the mantle of the Crooklyn Dodgers super-crews of the early- to mid-1990s and comes up with a pretty strong and multifaceted borough-rep anthem, or Camp Lo's punchline-rich "The Milky Lowa", an update of LL's classic breakfast food metaphor track "Milky Cereal" ("'cause I'm all Vita-Man, blast o' Willie Dynamite/ Spill some cash soon, or your ass Kaboom!").
But all this early 90s-style rap traditionalism results in a limited palette, and the longer Dream Merchant 2 drags on the more it starts to border on the tedious-- not all of which can be placed on the producer's shoulders. I could be reading too much into the regressive throwback root of this album's problems-- 9th Wonder's production tends to blur into itself after a point, but a lot of these MCs would still be slack if they were rapping over Timbaland or El-P or whatever other out-there antithetical futurists might cross your mind. Ironically, it's the closest Dream Merchant 2 comes to a big-banging club track, "No Time to Chill" (featuring a brief reunion of Little Brother with the estranged 9th), that proves to be one of the bigger disappointments; everything Phonte and Big Pooh have got going for themselves lyrically here gets negated by a hook so cliché it comes across as an afterthought ("It's time to live and a time to die/ It's a time to laugh and a time to cry" -- oh, come on).
And Saigon's verse on "Saved" has one of the sorriest excuses for attempted political insight since Dead Prez claimed robbing pizza delivery guys was an act of revolution on "Hell Yeah". I know GLBT rights aren't much of a priority in rap but "how the black woman the number 1 catcher of AIDS/ And we all know that bullshit spreaded from gays" is pretty damn ignorant. And the lesser-known artists on this comp mostly fail to attach any distinct personality to their unfamiliar names; you can only hear so many bargain-basement Big L soundalikes tout their lyrical credentials on some tell-don't-show shit and order haters to fuck off with the same midtempo like-crunk-never-happened delivery before you start going crazy from deja vu. I hear hip-hop aging on this record, but I don't hear it growing up.
