re-mixed by MadlibA 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).
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