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).

Crate Digging: Electric Circus

by Common

It felt like it was time to re-examine Common's much maligned and misunderstood 2002 album Electric Circus, which was mostly produced by the Soulquarians - ?uestlove, J Dilla, and James Poyser, although the Neptunes step in on a few tracks.

The album starts with an innocuous and bland intro, before moving into a nice Dilla track, 'Soul Power'.  'Aquarius' is another strong track, but 'Electric Wire Hustler Flower' is exactly the type of song that led to this album being criticized so heavily.  It's actually a decent piece of music, but I think that 2002 wasn't quite ready for it.

From there, the album moves back and forth through a few different moods.  Karriem Riggins provides a cool beat for 'The Hustle', and then we get the Neptunes's version of 'Come Close', which is a great song, but not as good as the Dilla remix which came out afterwards.

A big part of the problem with this album is that it moves from nice airy optimistic songs like 'New Wave' to countrified bangers like 'I Got a Right Ta', to story-based songs like 'Between Me, You & Liberation'.  It's a little like Common had a vision for the album, one best matched by the barely hip-hop songs like 'Jimi Was A Rock Star', but then got cold feet and had to include some slightly more traditional numbers.

The album ends with 'Heaven Somewhere', a long and lovely piece that features a number of incredible singers like Cee-Lo, Bilal, Jill Scott, Mary J. Blige, and Erykah Badu, before being given over to Common's 'Pops', who always closes his albums with a spoken word piece.

At the end of it, it's easy to see why this album wasn't very well-liked when it was released, but after being allowed to age a few years, it appears to have predicted some of the more spaced out hip-hop of artists like Dudley Perkins and Georgia Anne Muldrow, and is an important piece in the evolution of Dilla and ?uestlove's production.