Guilty Simpson is the kind of rapper traditionalists love—weathered as old boots, lyrically focused, incapable of tethering himself to any fashionable sound. He forged his style in Detroit way before 8 Mile burned an image of the city into hip-hop consciousness. As the years passed, some of his contemporaries went on to bigger things while others fell by the wayside, and his trusted ally J Dilla died far too young. All the while, Simpson mastered the art of remaining true and staying still. It’s 2020, and he is still worshipping the gods of boom-bap, still unleashing that cast-iron voice, still making old-school Detroit hip-hop.
Guilty’s best album is the decade-old OJ Simpson, in which Madlib’s kaleidoscopic beats snapped together with his collaborator’s monotone flow. But with the once-touted OJ Simpson 2 nowhere near materializing, the rapper required a new collaborator, a partner in crime outside the hip-hop ecosystem that would appeal to his singular tastes. As things turned out, Simpson needed to look halfway around the world.
Enter Jeremy Toy. The New Zealand producer and engineer—operating here under the name Leonard Charles—has enjoyed a nomadic career as an multi-instrumentalist and producer in an island nation with about half the population of Michigan, but his spiritual link to Detroit was forged when he dared to remake J Dilla’s Donuts with live instruments. Some would argue that touching the postmodernist instrumental masterpiece qualifies as sacrilege, but Toy is nothing if not audacious.
Simpson and Toy have dubbed their partnership The Leonard Simpson Duo, and their album title bears the abbreviated initials LSD. The hallucinogenic name foreshadows the freaked-out sound: Trading in psychedelica, the union resembles a rap blog-era mash-up of ’90s street rhymes and ’60s San Francisco psych. It’s sometimes jarring, like spotting a time traveller strolling through the hippie-era Haight-Ashbury in Cross Colours.Take the strangely haunting “Nobody,” which rides a sample of Marlon Williams and Aldous Harding’s 2018 duet “Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore” manipulated to sound like a ’60s folk ballad. Over washed-out guitar chords, Guilty shares space with an angelic vocal loop before making way for a sour guitar solo. There’s even a couple of instrumental interludes peppered throughout LSD, resembling a teenage band working through a fixation with the 13th Floor Elevators.
When in the mood, Charles can cook up a meat-and-potatoes classic. On “G.U.I.L.T.Y.” he takes a spelled-out sample of Simpson’s name cuts it with heavy ambient and psychedelic tones, gifting the rapper an eponymous anthem in the vein of Snoop Dogg’s “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” or Cam’ron’s “Killa Cam.”
After years spent driving towards a more hardened street sound, Simpson is tested by Charles’s orchestration. It’s fair to say that Guilty’s writing isn’t always at its peak—“I’m inspired by hate/It makes me want to be great,” he says on “My Inspiration”—but there are moments when he is extremely fun. The swirling electronics and hard-knocking drums of “Bricks” gives Simpson a chance to unleash his blunted syllables gloriously. “Friends,” meanwhile, resurrects the famous hook from Whodini’s song of the same name over knocking drums and light keyboard licks. It’s pretty funny to hear a grizzled old 40-something rapper rant about the snakes in his friend group. It perhaps encapsulates LSD, a strange odyssey of opposing elements and counterintuitive choices.
