Indie-rap has long had a chip on its shoulder, a muddled notion that real rappers don't make money or, if they do, don't talk about their money, that these things represent an affront to the noble and longstanding culture of hip-hop. It's usually not quite clear what hip-hop is if it doesn't include this stuff; it's a subculture always reacting and almost never acting. Things Go Better With RJ and Al, the second album from the Columbus, Ohio duo of rapper Blueprint and producer Rjd2, starts out doing the worst thing an indie-rap album can do: furiously declaiming itself as being firmly and militantly on the indie side of the divide: "No slogans, no 20-inch rims rolling/ No gold fronts, no publicity stunts." The song, "No Gimmicks", is clumsy, reductive, and hookless. On the next song, Blueprint is still saying the same stuff: "Rap nowadays is by a bunch of ignorant cats/ No 'Young, Gifted and Black', just guns, bitches, and crack."
So if this guy is so firmly devoted to the cause of real hip-hop that he'll spend the first two songs on his album bitching about the state of rap, the question becomes what, exactly, Blueprint thinks is real hip-hop. Judging by the rest of the album, Blueprint thinks hip-hop means Will Smithian joke-raps about hooking up with ugly girls when he's drunk or fools using up his cell-phone minutes. This should probably go without saying, but if you're going to insist that you represent the true heart of an art-form, it might be a good idea to actually have something to say.
Fortunately, though, Blueprint is pretty good at this joke-rap stuff, and once he gets the bluster out of his system, he's a lot of fun, kicking good-natured punchlines and riding beats with affable warmth. And lucky for him, Rjd2 is just about the best producer in indie-rap, and his gooey classicist strut-funk has none of the exhausted emptiness that it did the last time he produced an entire album, Aceyalone's Magnificent City. "I'm Free" comes with a great hard-swinging horn riff and a biting funk-guitar sample, while "Drugs, Sex, Alcohol, Rock-n-Roll" builds on a nice distorted bass-stomp and 1970s flute-flecks before finally turning into an instrumental breakdown that sounds like vintage Blue Cheer.
Seeming short at 40 minutes, it's a slight album, and it's marred by Blueprint's slavish devotion to his own goofy song-concepts, like "I'm Free", which uses the word "free" on every line. Blueprint also has a tough time with hooks (he usually just repeats a couple of words over and over and hopes that it suffices) and a troubling streak of churlishness, advising young women to never have sex on "The Cool Thing to Do" and telling the story of a girl who gets molested and ends up becoming a lesbian on "Drugs, Sex, Alcohol, Rock-n-Roll". But at least he resists the temptation of pointing out that "Keys" is about the little metal things that open doors.
