Hip-hop sucks. It must. Otherwise, Little Brother's battle cry of returning the art form to its rightful place makes less sense than it did nearly 10 years ago, when artists who weren't signed to a major label proclaimed them. So what is Little Brother saving hip-hop from? According to them, commercial artists' focus on sex, guns, and accessories are the modern-day equivalent of Vaudevillian blackface performers, seizing upon the worst characteristics of black society and hyperbolizing them to entertain a non-black audience. The proposed minstrelsy of hip-hop doesn't explain how the #1 album and single in the country come from a guy whose lyrics are more introspective than Conor Oberst's, whose biggest hit to date is about Jesus, and whose name is in everyone's mouth from suburbia to the White House because of his nationally-televised political stance.
Is Kanye in blackface? Better yet, is Missy? Or Outkast? These aren't fringe performers. They are a few of the biggest selling pop artists of the last half-decade, all of whom enjoy widespread cultural influence and power. Little Brother imply that anyone who raps about anything other than "real life" [read: middle-class struggles] is a disgrace, a Pied Piper to the youth, a traitor to his or her culture who needs to be shown the path to redemption. Their stance also assumes that the listening audience isn't intelligent enough to distinguish between fact and fiction, reality from rented props. If Little Brother's product were as enticing as any of the artists they decry as sellouts, their message might carry more weight, but The Minstrel Show adds up to little more than a loose concept constructed on tiresome production so that the group can pound its ham-fisted homilies.
The album's Minstrel Show is a fictional Saturday Night Live-type program televised on the UBN (U Black Niggas-- a revealing bit of finger-pointing) network, which provides the basis for the bounty of skits and jokes throughout. Some of the skits are funny at first listen, but the skit long ago became the wanky guitar solo of hip-hop. Save the skits and one stab at soft targets, R. Kelly and Ronald Isley, Little Brother make no attempt to adhere to the concept. Lyrically, Phonte and Big Pooh offer a variety of "we're better than you" battle rhymes but aren't bold enough to say why. If they're on a higher plane, it seems they could come up with a few clever metaphors explaining such, but no. On "All For You" they tackle the difficulties of fatherhood, but it's an all-too-brief blip of social consciousness. To his credit, Phonte is an intelligent lyricist, and when he isn't married to bad ideas, he shines, as on his Foreign Exchange album with Nicolay.
And then there's 9th Wonder, whose production was supposed to change the game ever since the Roots' ?uestlove got a crush on Little Brother's early demos in 1999. The ever-graying cloud over 9th's beats is that they still sound like early demos. Despite being signed to a major and scoring scads of outside production work, 9th still sounds like he's tapping his fingers on a Best Buy synthesizer. His whispy snare hits have become so predictable you could sync your grandmother's treadmill to their rhythmic lethargy. And can we put an end to the neighborhood D'Angelo singing hooks on hip-hop records? 9th Wonder is proficient enough in selecting a soul sample and throttling the bassline that not everything is a dud (lead-single, "Lovin' It", "Hiding Place" featuring Elzhi, and "Say It Again").
Little Brother have good intentions. They want to sound like the groups they grew up enjoying, namely A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Pete Rock & CL Smooth (they even homage ATCQ's "Oh My God" on "Still Lives Through"), but their songs sound more like signifiers of those groups, not their logical descendents. Unfortunately, the hype that floated Little Brother's careers over the last six years may have affirmed some bad habits (narrow content, homemade beats) and encouraged lofty aspirations not yet attainable. If they want to create an alternative to the types of hip-hop they don't respect, they would do well to study the lessons of their favorite records.
