Madlib Medicine Show No. 13: Black Tape

re-mixed by Madlib

A lot of my early enthusiasm for the Madlib Medicine Show waned through the months of 2010, when these Madlib CDs were supposed to be released on a monthly basis, as I found that too many of them sounded the same as one another, and felt a little rushed.

Now, Madlib has dropped one final installment in his series, the Black Tape, which is really Madlib Medicine Show No. 12, part two, as it picks up where the last one left off, making use of the same interludes (I never need to hear about the Beverly Hills Blues Festival again), and generally just remixing any number of hip-hop artists.

The difference with this disc is that it moves a little further back, playing around with music from the early 00's.  I recognized songs from Ghostface, Talib Kweli, Common, Eminem, and more.  A number of these songs are ones I am very fond of, as this represents the era when I returned to hip-hop, and was refamiliarizing myself with the underground and 'backpack' sounds.

What really makes this disc stand out for me are the two different tracks where Madlib borrows some spoken word poetry from the movie Slam, featuring Sonja Sohn (from The Wire) and Saul Williams (who closes the CD).  Every time I listen to this, I'm almost overcome by an urge to dig out my DVD of Slam and watch it again - it's a great movie.

The album contains some very disturbing cover art (kept shielded behind a black folded paper), which shows photos of digitally manipulated naked women.  Creepy.

Anyway, now that the Medicine Show is over, I'm hoping we will start to see more new output from Madlib (Seeds, his new album with Georgia Anne Muldrow is a good start).

Madlib Medicine Show No. 12 - Raw Medicine: Madlib Remixes

Remixed and Produced by Madlib

I feel like the Madlib Medicine Show ended up being a bit of a disappointment in the end.  The monthly schedule was abandoned a while ago, and the last few entries (particularly the 9th one) weren't all that impressive.  When I first heard this twelfth (and final?) disc, I didn't much like it at first.  With repeated listening it grew on me, but I still feel like it's a little too long and self-indulgent (despite being, at 60 minutes, one of the shorter entries in this series).

Basically, Madlib has taken a bunch of older hip-hop songs, and remixed them, filling in the space between them with way too many interludes and skits that may be funny the first couple of times you hear them (especially if you're high), but quickly become tired and played out.  Artists that appear on this disc include J Dilla, MF Doom, Ghostface, Q-Tip, Phil da Agony, Sadat X, Guilty Simpson, MED, Cappadonna, The Clipse, Royce the 5'9, Musiq Soulchild, Frank N Dank, AZ, Royal Flush, Kardinal Offishall, and a bunch more.

As a background mix, it's pretty nice, and Madlib's beats are great, as always, but the disc lacks any kind of unity or consistency, and that makes it pretty forgettable.