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Sensational, "Speaks for Itself"
Veteran MC and onetime Jungle Brother Sensational's Speaks for Itselfgave me pause when I first heard it. It's so bad that there just HAS tobe more than meets the ear. Is it all a big joke, a hip hop farce,taken to an unlistenable extreme? Is it a deliberate ploy to shedlisteners or to get dropped from his label, a la Bob Dylan's Self Portrait?Or has Sensational really been a geek off the street with no ear forthe beat or knowledge of recording all this time (since 1993!) and he'sbeen fooling us all along? In any case, Speaks for Itself won'tfool anybody. It's just plain awful.
Quatermass
To his credit, in the pastSensational has made a name for himself by being lyricallyidiosyncratic (muffled and mumbled vocals delivered at a frenetic pace)and uncompromisingly lo-fi musically (usually making tunes with nothingmore than a four track recorder and a Fat Boys-era drum machine). Theformula has worked before (this is his sixth solo album) and his indiecred is unquestionable, but Speaks for Itself falls flat on itsface from the first rhyme ("I always rock it right/ I always rock itright/Yea, I'm just so cool/ Yea, check my ice/ Blind ya sight"), andfrom there it just keeps on falling. For starters, the production is socriminally terrible that it's a wonder Quatermass bothered to releaseit. The beats are plain weak, uninspired at best but mostly justintolerable. Worse, the levels are all over the place. Sometimesthey're so high as to strain the speakers and drown out the lyrics,which is a blessing: after all this time in the game, Sensationalhasn't learned how to speak into a mic. He's either so close that hiswords are smothered in sibilance and popped Ps or he's about ten feetaway, drowned out in room echo. It might all be worth it if Sensationalwere some unheralded musical mastermind who just happened to be usinghis apartment's lobby as a studio, but he's far from it. Sensational'spoetic range consists of exhausted (and exhausting) self-aggrandizementthat, delivered in his clownish offhand way, come off as absurdly cornyand about as convincing as Warren Beatty's hip-hop turn in Bullworth.Just when it couldn't get worse, it does: Sensational drops the line "Iwas high when I wrote this" about twice per track, unwittingly makinghimself a Nancy Reaganesque poster boy for the war on drugs. Suchbuffoonish lyrical effrontery would be acceptable if it were part of acollection of freestyles. You can be forgiven for being repetitive orbland or even offensive when there's no prior preparation. But,stunningly, Speaks for Itself is indeed a studio recording -meaning that not only was the material "written" (more likelySensational wiped his ass with the lyric sheet), but that someone laidthese trainwrecks down on tape, listened to them, and pronounced itgood. Who's fooling who here? The rapper or the label? Sensationalisn't in a position where he can move 100,000 units of filler shitejust through use of his name, and Quatermass is no Def Jux. Even so,with a decent producer and a mixing board technician who wasn't AWOL, Speaks for Itselfcould have been salvageable. Sensational is a technically competentrapper with a decent flow but apparently he just can't be bothered, andneither should the listening public. - Chris Roberts
Quatermass
To his credit, in the pastSensational has made a name for himself by being lyricallyidiosyncratic (muffled and mumbled vocals delivered at a frenetic pace)and uncompromisingly lo-fi musically (usually making tunes with nothingmore than a four track recorder and a Fat Boys-era drum machine). Theformula has worked before (this is his sixth solo album) and his indiecred is unquestionable, but Speaks for Itself falls flat on itsface from the first rhyme ("I always rock it right/ I always rock itright/Yea, I'm just so cool/ Yea, check my ice/ Blind ya sight"), andfrom there it just keeps on falling. For starters, the production is socriminally terrible that it's a wonder Quatermass bothered to releaseit. The beats are plain weak, uninspired at best but mostly justintolerable. Worse, the levels are all over the place. Sometimesthey're so high as to strain the speakers and drown out the lyrics,which is a blessing: after all this time in the game, Sensationalhasn't learned how to speak into a mic. He's either so close that hiswords are smothered in sibilance and popped Ps or he's about ten feetaway, drowned out in room echo. It might all be worth it if Sensationalwere some unheralded musical mastermind who just happened to be usinghis apartment's lobby as a studio, but he's far from it. Sensational'spoetic range consists of exhausted (and exhausting) self-aggrandizementthat, delivered in his clownish offhand way, come off as absurdly cornyand about as convincing as Warren Beatty's hip-hop turn in Bullworth.Just when it couldn't get worse, it does: Sensational drops the line "Iwas high when I wrote this" about twice per track, unwittingly makinghimself a Nancy Reaganesque poster boy for the war on drugs. Suchbuffoonish lyrical effrontery would be acceptable if it were part of acollection of freestyles. You can be forgiven for being repetitive orbland or even offensive when there's no prior preparation. But,stunningly, Speaks for Itself is indeed a studio recording -meaning that not only was the material "written" (more likelySensational wiped his ass with the lyric sheet), but that someone laidthese trainwrecks down on tape, listened to them, and pronounced itgood. Who's fooling who here? The rapper or the label? Sensationalisn't in a position where he can move 100,000 units of filler shitejust through use of his name, and Quatermass is no Def Jux. Even so,with a decent producer and a mixing board technician who wasn't AWOL, Speaks for Itselfcould have been salvageable. Sensational is a technically competentrapper with a decent flow but apparently he just can't be bothered, andneither should the listening public. - Chris Roberts
samples:
- I Always Rock It Right
- Flossin' On The Ave
- My Style, You Like
