The HBMS Alumni Association: Native Tongues, Hieroglyphics, And...John Oates?!?!?!?!?
Written: Dec 12 '04
Product Rating:
Pros: A cohesive jumbling of genres, great songs galore.
Cons: Teeth-gnashingly annoying skits that interrupt the flow of the album.
The Bottom Line: Comedic interruptions aside, "White People" is like a musical buffet table. Paul & Dan take little bits of various genres to create a solid album.
speeddemon531's Full Review: White People [PA] by Handsome Boy Modeling School
Prince Paul is one of the original geniuses of hip-hop. Starting in the mid-80s as the DJ for Stetsasonic (or The Roots before The Roots existed), Paul went on to turn hip-hop on it's ear with his production on the first two De La Soul records. With a bag of bizarre samples, skits, and a healthy dose of weirdness, Paul helped make rap music cinematic.
Although his production resume has thinned out over the years, Prince has still enjoyed a healthy career-whether as a solo artist or in collaboration with like-minded artists. Handsome Boy Modeling School is a collaboration with DJ/producer/Gorilla Dan (The Automator) Nakamura. The Automator has worked with everyone from The Beastie Boys to Kool Keith to Primal Scream, and their second effort as HBMS, "White People", is as eclectic as that list of collaborators may suggest. It's roots are in hip-hop, but it's not a plain cut-and-dry hip-hop album. It does resurrect many forgotten names from the golden era of hip-hop and adds great performances by artists who range in genre from folk to indie pop to metal to...well, Linkin Park.
It also finds Paul reuniting with his prized pupils. "If It Wasn't For You" finds De La representing over a beat that sounds like it was ripped straight off of "De La Soul Is Dead" (this is a good thing). Pos & Dave show their appreciation for everything from daughters to pens (who else is gonna write a verse about a Papermate?) over jaunty horns and a slow-rollin' beat. Their Native Tongues brethren Dres (of Black Sheep)shows up later on the album with "First...And Then", where he shows he hasn't lost a step since "The Choice Is Yours" in '92, speed-rapping over vaguely Wu-esque minor-key piano and a click-clackety percussion arrangement.
Jack Johnson is certainly one of the more surprising names on this album, but his "Breakdown", to me, is the album's highlight. Jack always sounds like he's singing behind a cloud of marijuana smoke. All of his songs drop the blood pressure a few levels, and the easygoing "Breakdown" is no exception. It's also nice to hear Jack singing a more fully-formed song than his usual spare acoustic guitar-led jams. On "I've Been Thinking", Paul and Dan cut off all the lights except the red one, and let Cat Power vocally seduce over a mellow trip-hop/chillout beat.
Some songs seem to be an exercise in how many people they can cram on one track. "The World's Gone Mad" features smoove reggae crooner Barrington Levy (the guy on the Shyne records), West Coast giant Del Tha Funkee Homosapien and Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos. Del's zooted verses mesh well with Levy's impassioned singing. Kapranos' dry harmonizing and monotone verse doesn't exactly mesh perfectly, though.
The interesting "Rock & Roll Could Never Hip-Hop Like This Part 2" is a 4-part movement. Starting off with hip-hop pioneers Grand Wizard Theodore & Jazzy Jay discussing soundbite-style how hip-hop and rock owe a debt to each other (which goes way beyond "Walk This Way"), it segues into Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park dropping 16 furious bars (lost in the average music fan's hatred of LP is the fact that Shinoda has skills on the mic). From there, the tempo changes again to allow Juice Crew satellite MC Lord Finesse (unfortunately now best known as the guy who says "right about now...the funk soul brother" on Fatboy Slim's "The Rockefeller Skank"-a line he repeats here)to shine. The song culminates in the usual Chester Bennington scream-fest, but it's admirable that the HBMS principals managed to tie these four movements together on one song.
All of the songs on here are interesting, to say the least. Julee Cruise (who I only know from stocking her records) joins forces with Pharrell Williams on the upper-crust mocking "Class System", while the unlikely duo of Brit jazz star Jamie Cullum and John Oates (John Oates!!!) collaborate on the sweet soul ballad "Greatest Mistake", an unexpected smoochy ballad that manages to nicely juxtapose Cullum's grainy rasp with Oates' best Marvin Gaye impression.
This album drops the ball with the skits. Most of Paul's productions are skit-friendly, and the majority of the skits have been good (see 3rd Bass's "The Cactus Album" for proof). However, this album's skits feel more like interruptions. Tim Meadows' "Ladies Man" character gets stale after the second skit, and fellow "SNL" alum Father Guido Sarducci could have been cut off the album altogether. The album's only truly outstanding skit is a "Dating Game" parody featuring note-perfect impressions of Jay-Z ("I might take you over to Dame's house/'Cause my girl's at the crib"), and RZA-or, more appropriately, Wizza? ("hit me on the two-way, or bwackbewwy account").
Ultimately, if you could delete the skits (some of which, unfortunately, are tacked to the ends of songs), you would end up with an excellent album. "White People" is the type of genre mash-up that I always seem to find myself attracted to. If your tastes run all over the musical map, Handsome Boy Modeling School manages to combine true-school hip-hop with chillout, soul, pop and metal for a fascinating (and well-performed) mix-up of an album.
And hey, you've gotta love a band that names themselves after a fictional school immortalized on an episode of "Get A Life", right?
Handsome Boy Modeling School "White People"
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Repeat: "If It Wasn't For You" feat. De La Soul, "Breakdown" feat. Jack Johnson, "I've Been Thinking" feat. Cat Power
Skip: All of the skits except the first "Dating Game" skit (track 5)
Great Music to Play While: Wondering why they named the album "White People"?
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