If you're an American reader familiar with the British hip-hop duo Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip, I'm willing to bet one out of two things tipped you off: you saw that ridiculous name starting the Friday slate at Coachella and wisely chose to sleep in, or you got forwarded a YouTube for their signature track, "Thou Shalt Always Kill". From here on out, you can assume I'm speaking without hyperbole-- "Thou Shalt Always Kill" is the sort of song that makes me borrow something first said about "My Humps", namely that it transcends merely being horrible music and places itself into the realm of pure evil. A wanna-be novelty hit if there ever was one, it consists of Scroobius Pip (yeah, that's the rapper's name) rattling off a litany of "ooh...countercultural!" broadsides (examples: "thou shalt not buy Coca Cola products," "Bloc Party [they're] just a band") that assume absolutely no intelligence from the listener. It's a bizarre target audience this thing courts-- people "elitist" enough to sneer upon corporate brainwashing, yet simple-minded enough to surrender themselves to the ethos of Scroobius Pip.
If it stopped there, maybe they could be brushed off as a minor annoyance, but then Pip sets the scene for the rest of Angles with this: "Thou shalt remember that guns, bitches, and bling were never part of the four elements and never will be." (Never mind that a minute earlier, he deifies Johnny Cash, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix-- good luck finding no-good women and violence in their songs.) Now, it's bad enough when we hear KRS-One go off on tangents like this, but at least he made Criminal Minded, which included for-the-ladies chestnut "The P Is Free" and had the Teacher GRIPPING AN A-K ON THE FUCKING ALBUM COVER. Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip, on the other hand, have Angles, one of the most musically bankrupt and altogether philosophically fucked albums you'd be wise enough to avoid this year or any.
It's one of those rare occasions where you'd rather them just go with the whole "let's take it back to '88" shticks-- we could just shove them off to the sidestage at Rock the Bells and get on with our lives. But as "Fixed" boasts, "Dan Le Sac versus Scroobius Pip! Here to fix hip-hop, the best we can" (trust me, it's way funnier to hear than in print). How's that? Well, by jacking "Fix Up, Look Sharp", the lone celebratory track from one of the decade's most introspective and compelling rap records, and turning it into a demand that hip-hoppers stop trying to make pop hits and instead "be smart." And remember that it's "art." While there have been plenty of well-considered arguments that look inward at the genre and demand more of its practitioners, more often than not, it's from the perspective of an artist concerned about banking off the advancement of self-defeating racial stereotypes. Here, it just lays down an incredibly awkward subtext as to why the rest of "pop" (read: black) hip-hop owes it to these guys to straighten up and fly right. Did the era Sac and Pip constantly glorify not have just as much, if not more "dumb" party music? Just imagine some asshat telling the Fat Boys that "Wipe Out" was killing hip-hop. Mealy mouthed Pip apologizes, "We think there are some great artists out there, don't get me wrong," but judging from Angles, it's entirely unclear who the fuck they could be possibly be talking about.
OK, rap needs to be smarter. But apparently it, uh, needs to sample "smart" bands such as Radiohead like these guys do. For those interested, "Letter From God to Man" shits out "Planet Telex" undigested, a completely artless grab that flaunts none of the nuance of the Roots and Kanye West when they bit from Thom Yorke. Mind you, these are two popular acts. Way to go, Pip. To be fair, Dan Le Sac tries to be game here, pulling glitch-hop from its staticky grave with cut-up acoustic riffs that sound like that one time I tried to sample Iron & Wine's "Woman King" over a breakbeat and it ended up like Kid Rock (don't ask). An instrumental Angles wouldn't be intolerable.
But it's all ruined by Pip doing his Oliver Twista thing all over it-- because he's so smart, he's gonna enjamb as many words as possible into his verses despite the fact that his complete lack of breath control has him sounding like a pre-teen Victorian bootblack halfway through every line. "I'm not an alcoholic/ I just drink a lot/ I'm a genius/ Or maybe I just think a lot"-- this is how the second verse of "Development" begins before Dan Le Sac mercifully cuts Pip off, castigating him to get on some new shit before he can embarrass himself any further with this train of thought. But he soldiers on-- "I'm not trying to bore you/ I'm just tryin' to be a good role model for you." This comes immediately after an entire verse that quotes from the periodic table and right before he tells you who his role models were-- Chuck D, Rakim, and, of course, KRS, who should probably make it up to PM Dawn by having Prince Be bumrush the show during their next festival appearance.
It's bad enough that these guys pretty much owe their career to Sage Francis (now there's a guy in touch with the roots of this shit) and try to present their version of music as hip-hop in its purest form, but as "Back From Hell" pounds your face like Eminem's worst productions at 245 bpm, Pip spits "when I get back from hell again/ I'm gonna be so elegant/ The relevance of my benevolence is evident." Yup, looks like Party Fun Action Committee didn't ether Paul Barman after all, and now he's back with Mike Skinner's accent and the entitlement of a New Yorker subscriber.
