This album's first 10 seconds: a cavernous wind, an elliptical backwards sample, and 22-year-old East Londoner Ben Drew announcing that it's his "time," calling those of us on the receiving end of his lecture "fucking cunts" who'd "best listen up." Expecting his audience to tolerate such abuse requires a wildly self-serving imagination; this rapper is like Shakespeare's Richard III giddily wooing the widow of a guy he just killed. Opening track "Kidz" definitely wants to have it both ways (á la Larry Clark's cautionary/titillating film of virtually the similar name), indulging in myriad violent/sexual fantasies, but chorus-filing the first-person rant away as a (cliché) moral editorial about "kids today."
Five minutes worth of freshman Freud helps to synopsize all of side A, during which castration fear abounds. Each track oversalutes the speaker's dick, a phallus whose power is constantly under threat from eager vaginas rife with disease. The repeated images of throat-slitting obviously refer to a need to figuratively emasculate rivals (see the hip-hop tradition of penis-editing terror that dawns with Grandmaster Flash's "trying not to lose my head," running through "King Kut", the 1990s fixation with "peeling caps back," and even "Where's Your Head At"). Taboos such as anality and necrophilia are alternately seductive and horrifying, as the speaker waffles between primal and civilized urges. Resentment of an inability to monopolize the female parent's sexual attention surfaces on "Mama (Loves a Crackhead)". The forbidden youthful desire for the sister is fulfilled on "Charmaine", about a 14-year-old who can be humped because her "enormous" breasts constitute "real woman"-hood (after an intimidating encounter with the "shiny head" of an oversized "doorman"). The first seven of these 14 songs peaks with the blindingly Oedipal "I Don't Hate You", a massive takedown of a father ill-fated by his intimacy with the gods.
The second half wakes up from a dreamstate to analyze it; the speaker wonders aloud at his subconscious reasons for his behavior. The music-- previously reliant on two guitar chords (either played mournfully or Doobie Bros-fully) over huge drum loops-- recedes into the trappings of sophistication: "Everyday" owes its titanicness to the lack of an anchoring beat, electing to subsist on a chamber-pop requiem. I'm tempted to think that B has heard the transcendent and beautiful drumless bootlegs of Terror Squad over Modest Mouse and the Streets over Red Hot Chili Peppers (by DJs Erb and Simon Chapman, respectively). The track reveals that, somehow, the syncopated bottom-end of most rap anthems serves to mellow the urgent lyrics rather than intensify them. Diddy even begins his new album over a Tears For Fears sample that never "kicks in"; what I'm trying to say is that hip-hop can go "ambient" without succumbing to (let's not name names) avant-garde paroxysms.
The redundant thuggishnesss of side one (talking tough shit about being sick of people talking tough shit?) gives way to the staccato piano of side two's brilliant debunking of gangsta poseurs, "Where Ya From". The early addiction-rants and stoner-reveries yield to the condemnation of drug use that is "Missing Links". Fans of unbowed hardness will probably be made ill by "Couldn't Get Along"'s trucey soft-rock percussion, tear-verge vocals, and Phillip-Glass-meets-*"*The Young and the Restless" musicianship.
Plan B manages to milk his biographical plight without resorting to the childhood-trauma-as-pissing-contest tactics of most memoirists, even if he does exceedingly privilege death as a harbinger of realism. (In fact, some of his efforts reveal melodramaturgy similar to the convenient resolutions of "issues-based" cinema such as Traffic and Crash.) The darkness can be a little much, because he's never flat-out ridiculous like, say, Fear smirk-singing about nun assault, but B's cauldron of bits from the Bible, Nas, and Prodigy gets lightened a tad by shout-outs to Coolio and Hall & Oates.
Still: dude's named himself after an emergency contraceptive-- what do you want? He's too busy pointing out how elements of mainstream (Michael Jackson, TV news) and high (Irreversible, City of God) culture are as bilious as their low or underground counterparts to even bother caring about his own supposed genre; the electrocrash of Hadouken's (non-album ) remix of "No More Eatin" is more grime than anything on Who Needs Actions When You Got Words, which pretty much sounds like a UK Sage Francis produced by Everlast. (The BBC calls his music "urban." So, what, Jarvis Cocker is "rural"?) And to be fair, the album's sensitive wrap-up contains consecutive songs about rendering folks toothless; Freudians claim that the loss of choppers symbolizes impotence. Regardless, "I Don't Hate You" bears some of this year's sharpest fangs.
