If Kanye West came into the game as "the first with a Benz and a backpack," then Mr. Lif was surely "the first with dreadlocks and Harry Potter glasses." The thoughtful, earnest, and unapologetically cerebral Bostonian might be a prototypical "rapper that liberal arts kids like," but he's also ferociously on-point and prodigiously skilled. His last full-length, Mo'Mega, winningly mixed warnings about government conspiracies and mind control with disarming odes to his unborn children and truly unexpected feminine-hygiene advice. On new album I Heard It Today, he takes this autobiographical tack a step further, fashioning each song as a sort of unfiltered blog-entry reaction to the news as it happens. He wrote, recorded, and released to blogs the songs on the record over the course of fall 2008, as the economy plummeted, election fever set in, and Barack Obama won the Presidency. Lif's intentions-- to heat up his politics with personal immediacy-- are admirable, but the result, unfortunately, recreates a bit too successfully how it might feel to read a Mr. Lif Huffington Post column.
The successes and failures divide pretty evenly into songs that benefit from the sense they were spilled out in one long breath and ones that feel like they were written on a napkin minutes before recording. "Welcome to the World" and "What About Us?" were penned, as Lif tells us in the liner notes, as responses to the collapse of the world economy and the bailout plan, respectively, and they are sincerely aggrieved, gut-level blasts that benefit from the surging beats (by some dude named, no joke, Batsauce) that nicely recreate the sort of muscular apocalypse-rap Lif was rhyming over on the Emergency Rations EP. Other songs fall prey to the Cornel West rap-album-as-seminar problem, where Lif get so worked up he sort of forgets he's supposed to be rapping: "It hurts that even our most prestigious leaders cannot shun what these centuries of hatred have done" or "They were willing to give people with bad credit loans because they knew within a few years, we're out of our homes and they can buy up all the same properties" might be salient points, but they don't exactly make for natural-sounding lines.
Which brings us to the other problem: Lif's always had passion and verbal dexterity to burn, but his lyrics typically don't offer much that you can't gather from your first Propagandhi album or an Alan Moore graphic novel. It doesn't help that he still insists on saying things like "We should use our mind power to collapse the walls." He also remains touchingly convinced that his decision to wear dreadlocks is controversial in any way, shape, or form: "While I'm walking down the street, I see it all the time/ People looking at me like my dreads are a crime/ They signify the fact that I refuse to conform/ And I rock 'em real thick, cuz I'm allergic to the norm." His most thoughtful moment on I Heard It Today comes on "Head High", where his indignation cools a bit and and he gets reflective: "It hurts me to the marrow when I drive through the ghetto/ And see my peoples caught up in a life that won't let go/ And what's weird is/Few of them will hear this/ Melody I'm pouring from my heart so fearless." It's moments like these that make Lif so appealing: he might be touring the Seven Sisters college circuit for the rest of his career, but he embraces his turf wholeheartedly and raps with palpable zeal and conviction. Unfortunately, the ratio of thoughtful zeal to clunky screed this time around is decidedly not in his favor.
