Flava and Chuck. Ghostface and Raekwon. Andre and Big Boi. Eazy and Dre. Eminem and Dre. The history of hip-hop is full of odd couples-- most often, the raving, paranoid madman and his wiser, more stern companion. Hell, even The Sugarhill Gang had Master Gee. Hot-buttered a pop da pop dibbie dibble, my ass. The Ultramagnetic MC's, however, were the first all-lunatic rap group, one that would straitjacket the way from Digital Underground to Company Flow. If they offered anything truly innovative, it wasn't so much in their brilliantly swift, stilted flow or crushing rhythmic density as it was in the establishment of this unique dynamic.
To claim that Critical Beatdown is the greatest hip-hop album of 1988 would take a lot of courage-- after all, it was the zenith of hip-hop's Golden Age, boasting classics from nearly every influential late-1980s rap group. And even if Ultramagnetic's Kool Keith and Ced Gee didn't possess the intricate rhythms of Rakim and Chuck D, or paint vivid ghettoscapes as well as KRS-One or Slick Rick, Critical Beatdown is still probably the hardest, fastest, craziest hip-hop album of that year.
Critical Beatdown's surging psychosis is primarily due to its producers. Ced Gee was one of the most respected, radical maestros of the era, devoting some of his energies to Boogie Down Productions' untouchable Criminal Minded. DJ Moe Love was more interested in using the turntable's sounds than its samples', helping transform DJing into turntablism. Never mind the chilling hisses and heckles or the charred slabs of swollen funk; Beatdown has as much screaming as the average punk or metal album. Those screams, of course, are ingrained in the very fabric of the beat, concealed and crippled amidst the relentlessly fuzzing bass. And like most great rap albums, many of them come from the patron saint of yelps, James Brown, and flurry and flux with such abstraction and chaos that they make the beats feel deceptively fast-paced.
Though many of these samples were standard-issue in the 1980s, they're arranged into patterns like split-second greatest-hits discs. "Ease Back" never sounds particularly innovative, but the bruising conflict between The Meters' "Look-Ka Py Py" and the JBs' "The Grunt" justified the existence of sampling in an era in which to some it was still oddly despised. On "Ego Trippin'", the beat is a mosaic of hacks and howls that sound as if they could suddenly disappear under the monstrous beat. On "Funky [Remix]", the stratifications of snares and basses bring out some gentle, foreign incantations rhythmically chirped by buried female voices. On the record's best track, "Ain't It Good to You", the frantic, proto-drum-n-bass beat breaks into inebriated static and a core that sounds like every sample on the album searing into one another.
Kool Keith and Ced Gee's lyrics often seem as if they're not really about anything at all: The opening track asks the listener to do the one thing it's impossible to do to music-- "Watch me now"-- and things don't get much more clear after that. For instance, Keith's first verse begins, "Uno dos not quarto/ Spanish girls, they call me Pancho/ When on the mic, innovating this patterning," and ends, "I'm in a movie scene/ Ears turn, and needles lean/ To cut scratches." On "Ease Back", he "relates it verbal/ Dissing a mouse and smacking any gerbil/ I bought a Saab, a 1990 Turbo." Keith could have wished for any future model, but he went for the Saab: Now that's lyrical ingenuity. (In a recent Mojo interview, Keith reported that the MC's "read a lot of Popular Mechanics"-- so perhaps that explains his predilection for sensible motoring.)
But despite Keith's reputation, Ced Gee is the source of the album's most insane, digitalk-quantum gibberish, spouting lines such as, "A certified rhyme that I use, confuse, clock the time to a point/ A metaphysical radius," or, "Using frequencies and data, I am approximate." Ced's rhymes are so "approximate," in fact, that they should be studied in seminars alongside general relativity. And despite his philosop-hop, he can still sound as tough as NWA, claiming, "I will melt anyone who even tries to feel an emotion." That anti-sentiment sentiment sounds odd until we find out Ced is a robot: "I'm like a merchandise, a customized item/ Computer rapper for ducks who wanna bite them."
In a year that's already seen too many needless hip-hop reissues (from Nas to Non Phixion), Critical Beatdown's six bonus tracks-- including many of the group's early singles-- are probably not worth seeking out unless you're a bit more ultramagnetic than the casual fan. Those tracks are sparser and slower, and they feature group raps, an unhealthy amount of beatboxing and kind-hearted disco synths. The original 12-inch of "Chorus Line"-- with its punctured vocals and melodramatic reverb-- still has the faint residue of hyper-lunacy, even though Tim Dog is on the mic. The classic "Travelling at the Speed of Thought [Hip House Club Mix]" is a frilled techno fiesta, and is the most mainstream thing Kool Keith has ever done. (And even then, it has a clarinet solo.) For the initiated, though, the reissue sounds slightly crisper than the original, and the extras are nice additions to a flawless album-- one that stands tall today as one of Golden Age's most ageless.
