Beans
Shock City Maverick
(Warp)
Two years after the demise of his trio Antipop Consortium, hip-hop iconoclast
Beans is keeping busy. In 2003, the New York-based MC and producer released
his first solo album, Tomorrow Right Now, and an EP, Now, Soon, Someday.
In late 2004, after attention-getting stints touring with such underground-rock
hotshots as Tortoise and the Rapture, he dropped his second full-length, Shock
City Maverick. Kanye West and his fellow chart hogs probably aren’t sweating
the competition, though. Although the pocket-protector set hangs on his every
syllable, Beans has yet to seduce the hoi polloi. Maybe it’s because he scorns
the usual hitmaking tricks – sing-along R&B hooks, celebrity cameos, cheesy
horn samples, the seemingly obligatory “comedy” skits — or because he’s signed
to Warp, a UK label that specializes in undanceable dance music; whatever the
reasons for his obscurity, one suspects that Beans doesn’t care whether he ever
makes the cover of Vibe.
Calling himself the Ornette Coleman of rap, “the link between Suicide, Sun Ra, and Bambaatta,” Beans clearly has ambitions of another type: not the Cristalle wishes and Hennessy dreams of his mainstream counterparts but the desire to overturn the conventions of his genre, to spearhead a revolution in sound. Let lesser MCs traffic in infantile consumerist fantasies, the opiates of the bling-addled, bootycentric masses; Beans just wants to make it new. His sound is a fractured fusion of American hip-hop and tetchy European glitch: Lockstep techno beats bump up against knock-kneed cellos; sci-fi synths collide in a cacophony of chirps and bleats. Whereas most producers privilege hooks and choruses, the shiny ProTooled trappings demanded by today’s party people and their Clear Channel masters, Beans makes dystopian funk for postapocalyptic robots.
As a lyricist, Beans is no less challenging, spitting out run-on sentences
and random images with a violent precision, his flow seemingly unencumbered
by the constraints of syntax or human lung capacity. Elegant and nasty, cerebral
and visceral, his bizarre vernacular brings to mind a hip-hop William Burroughs.
Even when Beans resorts to standard boasting, he does so in a decidedly unconventional
way: “Trailblazer instigator insubordinator devastating radiating golden phonetic
pyrotechnic author of your obituary, adversary of the arbitrary,” he rants on
“Papercut,” a Dadaist battle rap of sorts that sounds like the soundtrack to
a 22nd-century spaghetti Western. On “Shards of Glass,” he dismisses his detractors
with a sneer: “Moth-ridden minds of nonbelievers say he ain’t ill, he’s incoherent.”
Maybe, but at the beginning of the previous century, people said the same thing
about Gertrude Stein.
Handsome Boy Modeling School
White People
(Atlantic)
In 1999, “Prince” Paul Huston and Dan “the Automator” Nakamura formed Handsome
Boy Modeling School, a vehicle for their delusional playboy alter egos Chest
Rockwell and Nathaniel Merriweather. Their genre-busting debut, So . . .
How’s Your Girl?, immediately became an underground-rap classic, a guaranteed
party-starter for fin-de-siècle college students and irony addicts. Named
after a skit from Chris Elliot’s short-lived sitcom Get a Life, the project
had all the hallmarks of a one-off novelty: a grab-bag of guest-stars, genres,
esoteric samples, and comedic turns from such iconic has-beens as Father Guido
Sarducci.
Well, Sarducci is back for HBMS’s sophomore outing, along with Saturday
Night Live comedian Tim Meadows and a motley assortment of guest musicians
ranging from Chan Marshall (Cat Power) to John Oates (Hall and Oates). The results
are sometimes delectable — given the prodigious production skills of Prince
Paul and Dan the Automator, how could they not be? — but the joke, alas, has
worn thin. Amusing as it might seem to team up David Lynch chanteuse Julee Cruise
with Neptunes brainiac Pharrell Williams, or gangsta-freak RZA with prog screamers
the Mars Volta, the tracks themselves often seem subordinate to the concept,
dilettantish exercises in whoa-dude mixology.
This article appears in Jan 6-12, 2005.
