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J-Live, "All of the Above" |
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Written by Abe Forman-Greenwald
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Sunday, 28 July 2002 |
Coup d'Etat
This second full-length album from New York City's J-Live showcases an
increasingly popular brand of hip-hop music: competent, decidedly
independent and exciting like a standardized test. I picked up this
album because it was touted as an Independent (with a capital "I")
parallel to early De La Soul albums and I had heard some of his early
tracks which were enjoyable and promising. I tried, unsuccessfully, to
listen to this album on my car trip back from Pennsylvania this weekend
with my sister and my girlfriend. We were so disinterested in the album
that we popped it out before it was finished and didn't even return to
it when we were stuck in a 45-minute traffic jam on the George
Washington Bridge. That's never a good sign. All three of us are De La
Soul fans so we decided to listen to the real thing and put in
"Buhloone Mind State" instead, which reinforced the reasons why "All of
the Above" fails the test. J-Live's voice sounds a lot like Dove from
De La Soul, but without De La's combination of singular beats and
abstract, singsong vocals, the effect falls flat.
I feel bad trashing him because I appreciate what he's trying to do:
return the spirit, creativity and jazz-inflected beats of the early
nineties to current hip-hop. Unfortunately, each song comes off like a
labored, calculated effort to do just that. He keeps reminding us that
he is the great independent hope, the savior of "true" hip-hop but
doesn't exhibit the inventiveness of Mos Def, The Roots, or even recent
De La Soul (who he shouts out here as a guiding influence). The main
failure of the album is that he spends so much time instructing the
listener on the sorry state of modern hip-hop that he makes no
contribution to reenergizing it. There are some bright spots on the
album though, including the song "Travelling Music" with its sweetly
nostalgic lyrics and instrumental combo of live vibes, bass and organic
cymbals. He also has some clever lyrical turns, as on the "The 4th 3rd"
in which he rhymes:
"Running from a paradox/
living like a pair of ducks/
but with different flocks/
with different destinations/
our ships remain docked"
More often though, his blatant attempts to highlight his superior
lyrical content shows through in choruses like, "It's just that
consciousness comes through on nights like this." On another chorus, he
makes a reviewer's job way too easy by asking, "Are you satisfied? I'm
not satisfied." I wish I was J, but I'm not either.
samples:
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