Del tha Funkee Homosapien has, for years, been widely regarded as King of the Oddball Rappers. Lugging the backpack long before there was a codified arty hip-hop scene, Del sneaked onto the radio, clinging by his fingernails to cousin Ice Cube’s Chuck Taylor strings. Of course, even his hard-rock relative was befuddled by the Sapien’s giddy spirals of abstract, meaningless verbiage. “Del,” queried Cube on his oddball cuz’s debut, “What the fuck is a Funkee Homosapien?”
What the fuck, indeed. Del was never shy when it came to flaunting his restless MC intellect, favoring elaborate puns and encyclopedic vocabulary over, like, meaning. The classic example of this, naturally, is Del’s first single, 1991’s “Mistadobalina.” The track served as a lengthy put-down on some guy named Mr. Bob Dobalina, about whom very little was clear except that Del found him a little silly.
Del has always seemed irritated at having to address the real world, and as such, his best verses are completely divorced from it. For the most part, his last few albums have kept things defiantly surreal, which is great fun, but also chafes the listener. Surely, a lyricist with Del’s heavy-duty intelligence has interesting thoughts to share about something other than how cool he and his friends are. It seemed we’d never know… until now.
Paired with the Automator, the Kool Keith–embraced–and–scorned poet laureate of creepy, oppressive beats, Del has finally sent himself where he belonged to begin with: outer space. On Deltron 3030, he unravels an album-length narrative about the titular year, in which he's a superhero named Deltron Zero (a plot not entirely dissimilar from that of RZA’s Bobby Digital). Armed with his two sidekicks, the Automator (here saddled with the unfortunate sobriquet “The Cantankerous Captain Aptos”) and scratch mastermind Kid Koala (aka “Skiznod the Boy Wonder”), Deltron-Z combs the galaxy, supporting his secretive Earthling existence by participating in weird rap battles where one's rhymes summon psychic powers that physically damage the opponent.
At least, that’s what may be going on. Like most hip-hoperas, there’s not much stock placed in narrative coherence here. Fortunately, the plot setup—delivered by a deliciously, almost impossibly bored-sounding Damon Albarn—gives way to a loose set of ruminations on a myriad of subjects. Of course, the rap-battle set pieces afford Del plenty of time to lavish attention to his favorite subject: how cool he is in relation to you and any poor soul who would dare challenge his verbal supremacy.
But, allowed room to imagine a whole world, many of Deltron 3030’s most impressive tracks show our hero exploring a wide-ranging variety of surprisingly weighty topics. The future is imagined from the bottom up: Del lives in a secret lair in the Bay Area, unbothered by exorbitant rents while the world around him falls to pieces. The Earth is run by a select, superwealthy oligarchy who have consigned the underclasses to rot away. (Yes, this is the future.) The environment's in ruins, there's fighting in the streets, and Paul Barman gets a speaking role. In short, things are in bad shape.
Such dire straits reveal Del as a surprisingly acute social critic. He even lacks a New York protest MC’s frustrating tendency towards self-righteousness, instead favoring targets that actually deserve his wrath: He wants to destroy corporate control and “convert them to papyrus,” mostly, and his oppressed underclass is racially diverse. Like the man says, “It’s not about separation/It’s about the population.” He resents the appropriation of hip-hop, but not necessarily by palefaces. He just doesn’t like biters because they're messing with the genre’s chances of being taken seriously.
In the end, that’s the most exciting thing about Deltron 3030. Though never self-satisfied or deliberately obscure, the record is an infinite improvement over the wanky verbal gymnastics that currently crowd smug, jerk-off rappers’ 12-inches. Though Del may have helped start that trend, here he aches to say something significant. In places—like the sad, almost Gothic “Madness,” the album’s masterful centerpiece—he even succeeds. Now liberated from the obnoxious demands of everyday reality, he’s finally found a way to say something meaningful about it.
