Before Prince Paul came on the scene in the mid-1980s, rap beats were mostly made from flipped funk and disco breaks and booming 808 drum machines and not much else. But with his work on career-defining albums by 3rd Bass, Big Daddy Kane, Queen Latifah, and especially De La Soul, he demolished established ideas of what rap beats were and could be, radically broadening the form's sonic horizons with collages of samples lifted from psychedelic pop bands, obscure jazz outfits, kids' records, and anything else he could get his hands on. In the process he laid down a foundation that producers from the Bomb Squad to Kanye and beyond have built upon, and helped considerably to further the argument that hip-hop deserves to be considered an art form every bit as much as rock does.
That aesthetic daring is what's earned Paul a permanent spot in the hip-hop history books, but he's also responsible for another innovation that's become deeply woven into the form's fabric, although to a much more ambivalent response from listeners: the rap record skit, wherein the musicians take a break from making music to show off their comedic talents, engage in ersatz phone sex, or threaten their competitors more directly than they can in song. The hip-hop skit has gotten a lot of bad press over the years, mostly because a lot of rappers are way less entertaining when they're not rapping, but ever since De La's 1989 3 Feet High and Rising, Paul's been working to elevate it to an art form.
In fact beginning with mid-career high points like 1999's A Prince Among Thieves and So…How's Your Girl? (the former a solo album and the latter a collaboration with fellow producer Dan the Automator under the name Handsome Boy Modeling School) his skits have been just as important a part of his records as the ambitious music surrounding them. Paul uses his skits to tie together the individual songs into concept albums ranging in subject matter from the vicissitudes of a career in the music business to extended riffs on references to an obscure and long-canceled sitcom, and to help make the whole far more entertaining than a concept album deserves to be.
Negroes on Ice may be the apotheosis of Paul's skit-centric approach to making albums. Creating alongside his son P. Forreal-- a DJ, MC, and beat maker in his own right-- music makes up just half of the album by track listing, and just over half of its run time. The rest of the record is given over to an epic spoken word story by P. Forreal that begins with him waking up next to his girl and ends almost an hour later, having in the meantime traversed the length and breadth of New York City being pursued by the police and a gang of Jamaicans, driven a Scion xB Scarface ("the rapper") edition through a gay pride parade, won a speedwalking race, eaten a dolphin, punched several dozen people (including his best friend, a few cops, and a dead helicopter pilot), and encountered Pusha T, Akon, Jimmie "J.J." Walker, Steven Seagal, and a busload of other celebs and semi-celebs, before (spoiler alert) robbing a bank and flying to Africa to work in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. It's something like Grand Theft Auto IV reimagined by a young pop-culture-obsessed rap fan buzzing off a junk food binge.
In a flip on the usual format, it's the songs on Negroes that serve as interludes to the skits. Putting together a skit-free version of the album in an iTunes playlist means missing out such LOL-worthy episodes as P. Forreal boatjacking a highly customized amphibian vehicle from Yung Joc, but it's a solid collection of music nonetheless. For someone with such a long and prolific career, Prince Paul has yet to release an out-and-out clunker, and although he's in his mid-40s his music still exudes the same enthusiastic energy as the material from nearly two decades ago. The beat to "Pixel Hero" is built around a nasty polyphonic keyboard riff and the kind of breezily funky drums that Paul helped to introduce to hip-hop, while the drum programming on "I'm a G" nods to the double-time rhythms of today's pop-rap even as a dizzily catchy piano line goofs off on top of it.
And while at this point P. Forreal is a slightly more accomplished storyteller than he is a rapper-- I bet he'd be a great standup-- he and a cast of little-known rappers like Breeze Brewin, T. Harris, and Soce the Elemental Wizard all deliver solid performances laced with a casual, slightly surreal sense of humor that pairs perfectly with the beats, and flows that indicate they've spent some serious time studying the Native Tongues scene Prince Paul was once part of. And if the ridiculously clever text-speak flow on "Textual Healing" is any indication, P. Forreal could easily establish a career independent of his pops.
Negroes on Ice is a funny record, but it's also a sneaky one. It bills itself as a goofy father-son collaboration with a bunch of no-name MCs in tow, and doesn't even note on its track listing the guest voice over appearances by Ice-T and Chris Rock, who could probably double the sales of the record by himself if it did. In fact it seems to do everything it can to come off like a throwaway album, which you might think it is up until the point where you find yourself hitting play on it over and over again.
