It's hard to remain both strident and surprising: Usually one tendency erodes the other until you get predictable or go soft. Political radicals Dead Prez have, up to now, demonstrated a career-long instinct for landing clean hooks from unexpected angles. Do you have a song decrying the complacency of big-budget hip hop? Yours is not Dead Prez's "It's Bigger Than Hip Hop", which was set to production big-budget-sounding enough that actual Complacent Big-Budget Rapper 50 Cent hijacked it to idly jab at Diddy. Do you have a song cataloging the evils of capitalism? Yours does not go so far as to include the rallying cry, "Organize the wealth into a Socialist economy," like "Police State". In a field full of mealy-mouthed sloganeering and smug self-satisfaction, Stic.man and M1 have the courage of their convictions, and they have remained radical and unpredictable for over a decade-- no mean feat.
All the courage in the world, however, could not salvage Information Age, in which the duo scraps every compelling element of its music and go full Enya. Give them credit: this, too, was anything but predictable. (Or perhaps the herbal tea, incense, and croutons of "Mind Sex" telegraphed all this to the observant years ago.) In interviews about the album, they've namechecked Afrika Bambaataa, dubbing the sound they've settled on here as "soul sonic," but the album feels like a Relaxation Spa compilation breathing softly on your neck hairs. It's a disheartening take on an old story, the one where well-established, respected artists tack bravely out into "new territory" and, well, just completely lose everyone.
M1 and Stic.man shouldn't be expected to keep the same revolutionaries' glower on their faces forever; everyone deserves room to evolve. But the neutered new age crooning of the hook on "A New Beginning" isn't evolution, it's a slow-motion car wreck. The chimes and string washes of the following track "Take Me to the Future"; the billowy, oscillating synths in "Time Travel"; they are the precise sonic equivalent of the poorly photoshopped Buddha on the album's cover.
Lyrically, the record is even sadder: Hearing two former firebrands and genuinely dope rappers offering Joel Osteen seminar-speak like "I want change I can live in, not just to believe in... I'mma start with the man in the mirror/ My vision getting clearer/ Feel like I'm at the dawn of a new era" is unspeakably depressing. On "A New Beginning", their rhyme patterns and messages are so rudimentary that the song skews closer to a low-budget PSA featuring public figures "rapping." It's impossible to know what M1 and Stic.man thought they were achieving by simplifying their message to this excruciating level, but it's mind-bending to consider an indefensible string of lines like "The more you know, the more you know you don't know/ And if you don't know there's more you can know, then you won't grow" or "Treat it like organic food, make it something you can chew" ("Learning Growing Changing") as the work of people who have had to dispel rumors of ghostwriting for Nas.
Then of course, there's "Dirty White Girl", which finds them calling white women "the devil's daughter" and features lines like "Milk on your moustache/ Ugggh, what's that? I don't trust that, that's suspect." No one should expect artists, not even explicitly political ones, to offer coherent social platforms, or consistent rhetoric; they just have to make good art. But Information Age doesn't work as enlightenment, as rap music, or as anything else, really. You can't bob your head to it; you can't learn anything from it. This is music that fails at everything it tries to do.
