Thes One and Double K, the Los Angeleans that make up People Under the Stairs, represent the traditionalist wing of underground hip-hop. Ambassadors of the Four Elements, the duo takes a luddite attitude toward both the ringtone-ready aesthetic of Southern rap and the nervous textures of the Anticon crowd: They are dyed-in-the-wool crate diggers, mavens of the analog who know how to grip mikes and govern crowds and work the stylus.
Over the course of five albums and numerous live shows, P.U.T.S. have come to embody the carefree, community-driven dream of early hip-hop, chiefly by dropping macho self-seriousness for a Saturday-afternoon ease and brightness of mood. (It's tempting to connect this attitude to their move, before their debut album, from Los Angeles to the cushier San Francisco.) Glazed with funk and jazz samples, their smartly sunlit throwback sound allied them with like-minded acts such as Pharcyde and tour partners De La Soul.
On their latest record, Fun DMC, P.U.T.S. happily exalt the mundane, turning the everyday material of urban existence into tunes suggesting that life ought to be lived as an eternal weekend. "We wanted to get the ambience of the dudes playing dominoes, the meat sizzling on the grill, the planes flying by," claim the duo on their website. "We just said, 'Let's try to get what our Saturday is like onto a record. Instead of making a record about Saturday, let's actually go out and record Saturday.'" In a marketplace that still puts a premium on rap sheets-- gangster chic's self-fulfilling prophecy-- it poses a commercial risk merely to chronicle your neighborhood get-togethers.
Nevertheless, instead of detailing the tragedy of their rough-and-tumble upbringing, the rappers show us how they skipped past it. "Gamin' on Ya" describes one charmingly dorky route out of the tough L.A. life, as the duo reminisces about their high-school quest to get high scores, not to get high. Video games aptly grace both the foreground and the back, which feels glued together from arcade-game found sounds and Nintendo 8-bit blips. We find another nonviolent ritual in "Anotha' (BBQ)"-- the joy of the cookout, itemized over handclaps and a loop of sighing disco guitars. The importance of friends ("D") and family ("A Baby", "Suite for Peter Pt. 2") wins out on this record, and an appropriately soothing ambience, free of bravado and menace and anomie, sweeps over the whole tracklist. Feel-good beats for feel-good reflections.
Any MC worth his kicks has to publicly feel good about his hometown, too. Hence "California", a sequel in spirit to Dr. Dre and Tupac's "California Love", which lives on here through the revival of its West Coast poplockin', famously vocoded Roger Troutman chorus. (Listen for a Pharcyde sample, too, among dozens of others.) P.U.T.S. love their state too much to watch it crumple in the face of vials and handguns. They don't ask for much. In "Anotha' (BBQ)" the rapper is simply glad he has never been shot. The theme of needless bloodshed recurs in "D", a heartfelt eulogy to a friend lost to the bullet, and in "Critical Condition", which expresses sadness about the absurdity-- and stubborn persistence-- of inner-city warfare. The duo sees this all as a kind of slow-motion suicide.
Behind all the summery sounds and sentiments, Fun DMC is not just a lament, but an argument. It is a battle of logic that California hip-hop has been conducting with itself, one that has been more philosophically central to rap than any other genres: Do you represent the hard truth of the street code or do you represent its rejection? This record chooses life. It chooses video games and comic books (if you buy the CD) and barbecues and family, growing up without getting old. To be sure, in terms of sound and production style, since 2006's Stepfather, P.U.T.S. have been returning to their roots: the smoky funk grooves, the boom-bap delivery, the patchwork of samples. But they also confront deeper matters, and sleekly weave them into their classic good-vibe atmosphere, offering listeners a new level of profundity, energy, and intricacy without surrendering the sheer pleasure they expect from a People Under the Stairs record.
