Five minutes after I had told my friends that I had run out of CDs to buy I was shelling out 30-something bucks to get Primitive Plus by Edan.
I bought this particular CD for two reasons; 1) Edan produces and has produced quite a few Mr. Lif tracks, and, 2) the CD cover art is littered with robots. There are, like, four in total. Incidentally.
(this is mainly for Ethan. The reason I was unable to make it to Pirates of the Caribbean was that a bottle full of Salmonella, fresh out of the autoclave, exploded, spraying a fine mist of bacteria everywhere. By the time it was contained and cleaned my clothes stunk so bad that a journey into the city would have been uncouth, gauche even.)
I've heard this CD about ten times now, and I'm not too sure what to make of it. Edan is obviously a fan of old school hip hop. There was an Edan produced on the Emergency Rations EP called Get Wise '91, which sounds like it was produced in 1991, and if it weren't for the references to George W., you'd swear it had been made over ten years ago. And, that's where Primitive Plus resides sonically, roughly between 1985 and 1990.
However—and this is where I'm beginning to appreciate this album—Edan isn't interested in merely recreating a particular sound of hip hop's past. Edan seems to be more interested in taking hip hop's clichés and blowing them up to such gigantic proportions that you could drag a couch into them and there wallow.
For example, when he writes a song about how he likes stealing from people, he doesn't just steal money, he steals bagels and strawberry milkshakes. When he writes a song about drugs, he weaves a sordid tale of aluminium smoking, as if that puts him in greater standing than all the other MCs who just smoke crack.
Edan is probably the first producer I've ever heard who after claiming not to make his hooks "for 'R and B' bitches," says that he makes them for "Japanese kids," a sentiment followed by what sounds like a reversed sample of some sort of Japanese choir.
He is also the also probably the first rapper whose energy is directed towards terrorising, of all people, elementary school children at a spelling bee. In that sense Edan is more like a hip hop Ween, and, like Ween, he's talented enough to make what is essentially silly music well.
(Also, last night, after having watched yet another spectacular performance by Slimey Things, Compadre and I went walking around the city to see whom we could burn. We managed to get into a club that normally wouldn't have accepted us because Compadre allowed some drunken girl to ride his skateboard. <--- that's not innuendo. Anyhoo, after getting in there we discovered that there was a lesbian party taking place. After being informed—by a woman in the men's toilet wearing a cop hat, no less—that we weren't gonna get in, we started a conversation with some stranger. Mr. Stranger was also intrigued by what was going down (<--- now, that's innuendo!) in the other room, the room made inaccessible to us by the cordon of gender identity and the doorman of sexual preference. We convinced the stranger that we would go back to our hotel room, shave, and return dressed as women and get him into the party. He said he'd wait half an hour for us to return.)
Edan is a bit of a rarity in hip hop. He's one of the few hip hoppers who can rap, produce and man the wheels. Fortunately, though he's divided his time between all three pursuits, Edan is more than competent in each of them.
Eh, I have nothing else to say.
Reviewed on Sunday, 14 September 2003