Pages tagged “lyrics born”

Bay Area rapper cooks up chunky hip-hop dancehall-pop stew

If Lyrics Born’s music were a soup and you were reading the recipe, it’d be fair to assume the final product might taste downright disgusting, what with all the disparate ingredients: Pointer Sisters synths, Living Colour guitars, Bootsy Collins bass, blaxploitation horns and thoughtful raps in a Tone-Loc growl with a C.L. Smooth cadence. But, in this case, on the Asian-American MC’s fourth solo hip-hop album, the stew is tasty. Sure, the first five tracks sound like they could’ve been on a 1990s House Party soundtrack, but the flashback—as with the Ed Lover Dance-worthy “Differences”—turns out to be refreshing. From there the album shape-shifts with varying success, moving from the Rick James-ian “I’m A Phreak” and the dancehall riddim of “Top Shelf” to the poppy Toni Basil handclaps of “Do U Buy It?” The album truly is everywhere at once, and for that it at least deserves a taste.

2003’s Later That Day, revised, remixed and rollicking

“Hold on, I'm coming,” the San Francisco-based hip-hop icon mutters at the beginning of this disc. He purposely invokes Sam & Dave—it’s a prophetic opener for this joyful album, which combines horn blasts, conga beats, precise rhymes and snare riffs for a funky, cohesive sound that mimics the noise of the city itself. Lyrics Born is capable of slipping onto the mantle of any environment—he successfully looped Mississippi hill country bluesman R.L. Burnside’s hypnotic guitar chords on last year’s A Bothered Mind—and here, he makes the entire Bay Area his dance floor, with help from DJ Shadow, Dan the Automator and more.