When the Das Racist narrative began to take shape, the trio was almost always presented as a New York rap act. That handy descriptor overlooked the fact that Kool A.D., the rapper born Victor Vazquez, is Bay-blooded. His recent solo incarnation acknowledges his roots more explicitly-- last spring's 51 and now, the sprawling mixtapes 19 and 63, are titled after Bay-Area bus routes. They're filled with local producers and the sort of minimal twitch-fizz beats aligned with San Francisco's hyphy sound, and he's often found snarling a solid E-40 impersonation. "I feel like while I still can, I should wild out the West coast a little before I completely grow up," he said in an unusually earnest interview a few weeks ago, and explained that he's spending prolonged stretches back home. "I'm guess I'm getting all my little nostalgia things out of the way."
But it would mean selling Vazquez short to say he's leaning on tradition or simply indulging Bay-heyday nostalgia on his new solo material. If there's a particular San Francisco artist he shares the most DNA with here, it's Lil B, the wildly unorthodox and prolific rapper whose Wifi signal strength has always been far more important than his actual coordinates. 19 and 63 are pegged as "outtakes and collaborations", and they share the same freewheeling (based?) sensibilities as many pages in Lil B's catalogue, clocking in at two hours and showcasing a scattershot couple dozen producers and guest rappers. As much as Kool A.D. pays tribute to his hometown with Mac Dre references and song titles like "Bay Shit", he deliberately strays from heritage formulas. He randomly shouts names like "Bieber" and "Madonna" throughout the tapes, and the single "Eroika" knowingly evokes raps in the mold of Lil B's "Ellen Degeneres". The wacky fusion of traditional Bay-Area themes and contemporary Web 2.0isms makes for some of the most delightfully unwieldy and entertaining mixtapes to arrive this year.
To call these tracks "outtakes" implies there was more than one take, but many of them sound like they were rapped off-the-cuff in a single go, which is generally for the best. Kool A.D. sometimes cuts the tracks off arbitrarily, loops the tape backwards, samples spoken word, or adjusts his vocal track to cartoonish speeds. He repeats lines we've heard before, as though he's folding a set of crude origami animals out of the same piece of paper. On 19, the thorny and psychedelic foil to the gentler 63, he defiantly chooses to name one of his catchiest-ever songs "Beautiful Naked Psychedelic Gherkin Exploding Tomato Sauce All Over Ur Face, Flame Grilled Painting". You might say he just doesn't give a fuck if there weren't some kind of base-level motivation required to sit down and record 38 rap songs. But for a couple of tapes so big and discombobulated, there are hardly any spots that feel too slack or sluggish. You can either pick out a standard album length's worth of songs to replay or listen to the whole shebang front to back, waiting for esoteric stoned gems and bits of spoken-word trivia to dislodge themselves and worm their way into your brain.
19 and 63 are organically avant-garde, and they assert Kool A.D.'s militant refusal to take himself seriously. Occasionally he'll break from his loopy gags and grow stone-faced, only to make a show of yanking himself back up into the clouds. "Shit, my dreams were probably made up in the Philippines/ By a little kid who would kill to live as ill as me," he raps with an unusually sharp-tongued political urgency on "Moneyball" before conceding, "Or some shit/ Man I'm dumb, I don't read enough." The raps are quickly cut short, and he heaves, "I'm an idiottttttttttttt." So many of these songs prove that he's both highly capable of and entirely unwilling to tuck his shirt in and rap a lyrically upright verse-- some of the sharpest stuff comes out of his mouth when he's slack-jawed and intentionally limp-tongued, as though he wants to distract us from how skilled he is by flubbing his words. He only succeeds in sounding savvier as a result, and it's often a deeply enjoyable contrast. Kool A.D. keeps proving that extremely talented underachievers are always the most fun to be around.
