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Edan - Beauty and the Beat Boston's hip hop scene is brimming with so much talent, I heard that the DJ's are wearing heavy grade UV sunglasses and a fifteen layer, adamantium laced exoskeleton with kung fu grip in order to safely touch the wax. Mr Lif, Akrobatik, and DJ Fakts One just dropped their debut album under supergroup moniker The Perceptionists. And Edan, Hip Hop's psychedelic trickster God, has released Beauty and the Beat, the concept heavy, ambient follow up to the oxymoronic Humble Magnificent. Edan drops lyrics as well as produces on this album, creating an effervescent psychedelic pop soufflé of context and content. Forceful and powerful old-school deliveries and poetically engaging lyrics make Beauty and the Beat shimmer in a way few new hip hop albums manage to, and the careful production give it a seemingly effortless cohesion that's both endearing and admirable.
On first listen, Beauty and the Beat is like wading through the purple haze in an aderol laced college house party – there are some brilliant words being exchanged, but it's hard to focus on golden nuggets of conversation amid all the detached ambience and eye rolling bliss. There is some prized, top-notch lyricism in Beauty, but the thematic guitar noise, and flaky Doors-esque samples, runs counterintuitive to that meditative space between your headphones. Beatwise, some of the songs are hard to distinguish from one another; Making Planets, Science of the Two, Smile, and the anthemic Promised Land have a tendency to flow in an out of one another. This may have been Edan's intention, but it does a disservice to the dramatically varying lyrics. And the song length doesn't help either: Like last year's vaunted Madvillainy album—arguably a vanguard concept record in its own right - many of the songs don't go past 2 minutes.
Edan's lyrics are intense visual puzzles painted with words. On I See Colours, he puts any inevitable drug talk to rest: "Hey Man, did you know Edan dropped like a sheet of Acid and snorted a gram of cocaine and chugged absinthe and then recorded Beauty and the Beat in a Funhouse all in one night? Yeah, and Kool Keith TOTALLY recorded Dr Octagynocologyst in a mental institution. Hey, I read it on the internet!") Fumbling Over Words that Rhyme is an intense course in hip hop history; either a passionate letter to Edan's forebears or a mish mash of tired, overemphatic namedropping, depending on how you're feeling.
A highlight is the two-part track, Making Planets. On the first part, a slow meditative beat lets Edan lay the foundational science for Earth: "I frolic in the sand with the colony of ants, my particles expand, building oxygen with plants...I logically advance with the knowledge of the past, ...the music is rap, my favorite color is math, the plan of attack is lacin' planet with wax...you stay patient as we lay the foundation, and assemble composition for the future generation." After some knocking, banging and construction noises with the ubiquitous guitar noise, guest lyricist Mr. Lif plays the devil to Edan's God, ripping up the track with a caustic, lyrically complex and deafeningly intense delivery. When combined with the rock opera grandeur of the production, this track is more 'mind expanding' than anything else on the record.
Another highlight track is the closing 'promised land'. With an anthemic string backing, Edan raps in interruptions and restarts; creating a superhero track that's not so much braggadocio as it is bombastic: "After pangs of the brain pain I came with the sell a lot plot for the megawatt mainframe—with a suit made of electricity, I ran through the great wall of China convincing me, that was after World tour, when I traveled through matter and did a battle in the Earth's core, I did the show on a fireball."
The poetic imagery and the transcendental pomposity of the track evokes the common space between psychedelic aesthetics and hip hop ethos. It's moments like these when Beauty and the Beat works best, when Edan can "use pens like hallucinogens, so who could pretend/my music ain't a beautiful thing?" Despite walking the line between the conceptual and the disjointed, and teasing us with brief glimpses rather than epic tracks, Beauty and the Beat is a positive sign of things to come. It's that rare combination of imagination, talent and innovation that cut and pastes the past into a pyrotechnically gleeful vision of the future.
Read our interview with Edan here.
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