How Digable Planets Straight New Yorked You
posted on Sep 10, 2005Digable Planets - Blackitolism (Link Expired)
“We Fade In And Out…”
In hindsight there should have been little surprise over the sudden success of Digable Planets’ first single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” and its iconic video homage to bebop jazz and Beat poetry. The song more or less follows the formula of Gangstarr’s “It’s a Jazz Thing” by highlighting the same general parallels between jazz music and free verse that had inspired Kerouac to flip the word “beat” decades earlier, but it has the crucial advantage of being a catchier, more marketable track. Moreover, the video for “Rebirth of Slick, while evoking nostalgia for a past era, features a Benetton ad’s cast of impossibly hip café denizens nodding and grooving to the smooth and intriguing flows of the three youthful emcees. In MTV terms this means that “Rebirth” was destined to get more burn than Gangstarr’s somber tribute to the age of be-bop. Coffeehouse pretense aside, the release of the single and the subsequent Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) LP could not have been more perfectly timed. An especially zealous critical cult that had formed around A Tribe Called Quest’s revolutionary The Low End Theory publicly longed for the arrival of an enlightened and consciously avante-garde “Jazz Rap” sub-genre. To their ears, Reachin’ sounds like the next episode.
The album’s familiar horns and drum kits and overt, nearly pedantic veneration of all things Black and retro, from Miles Davis to Nikki Giovanni, gives the spirited, often distinctive sounding record the appearance of a bland but sellable excercise in simplistic positivity. It doesn’t hurt that one can easily discern shades of De La Soul’s “Change in Speak” in “It’s Good To Be Here” (albeit without any actual change in speak) and locate the sultriness of Tribe’s “Bonita Applebum” in “Swoon Units.” It would be unfair to characterize the Planets’ music as a watered down Native Tongue sound, but the influence is apparent even if Digable’s beats don’t hit nearly as hard and the overall feel is so easygoing and familiar that the music comes off as predictable in spots. Advocates of the album were quick to point out the similarities between Reachin’ and Tribe’s debut, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, but hesitant to note that Digable’s effort lacked the sophistication, flavor, and edge of Q-Tip’s boom-bip. Without jeep-ready beats or Friday night radio mix show presence, a crew that was branded as “bohemian” or “alternative” by Rolling Stone or The Village Voice did not stand a chance of gaining credibility in rap’s underground. In the case of Reachin’ the streets didn’t even bother to disbelieve the hype, as they were already inclined to ignore a swiftly hijacked group whose major flaws were insultingly lauded as improvements upon rap, or even representing a departure from rap altogether.
It’s not as if the Planets did not desire to gain fan’s among Red Alert and Chuck Chillout’s avid listeners. Reachin’ is peppered with allusions to underground luminaries like Kid Capri and Scott LaRock. It is safe to say that the Planets were most likely attuned to the hip-hop culture known and loved by aficianados in the five boroughs. However, these references come off like cautiously sprinkled afterthoughts on an album whose very sound, save for maybe “N.Y. Is Red Hot,” feels better suited for the dorms and cafés that initially embraced the record than the streets that slept. Over a decade later, the album’s seeming artifice is understandable and easily forgivable. After all, Digable Planets were a rap crew formed in college, an act honed at student center talent shows. However, mainstream critics did Digable a major disservice by insisting that the group’s collegiate background is inextricably linked to an exclusive boho sensibility. This is nothing new of course. Ever since De La and Tribe stepped on the scene, critics have falsely assumed that the cuddly artsy image that is imposed on an artist by label execs and reviewers is actually a fabrication or delusion attibutable to the artist. For all of its missteps and quiet storminess, Reachin’ is filled with fiery rhetoric, and buoyed by a relatively mature sense of the coexisting danger and beauty of New York City’s ghettoes. Despite the album’s promise and the group’s obvious potential, any street edge present on Reachin’ is eclipsed by its unintentional pop appeal. Sure, Digable claimed that they treated rapping just like “bustin’ caps” and that they revered the wise words of Clarence 13X, and that they were surrounded by projects and pyramids, but as a wise man once said, success in hip-hop is more a function of where you’re at.
As it turned out, Reachin’ was not a sustainable commercial success. The follow-up singles “Where I’m From” and the anemic “Nickel Bags” were poorly promoted and coldly received. In the minds of many listeners the group’s overall impact and relevance was negligible. At best, Digable Planets was written off as a pleasant but abortive Native Tongue spin-off, worthy of a requisite MTV Party-To-Go slot and afterwards, an eternity of bargain bin invisibility. Digable’s sophomore LP, the beautifully convoluted, fantastically militant Blowout Comb arrived in 1994 with minimal label support and virtually no pre-release fanfare, touching down on a ruff, rugged, and raw rap terrain that had undergone enormous changes in only two years. In 1993, two related movements in East Coast rap emerged and flourished just in time to influence Digable Planets’ post-Reachin’ direction, as if to guide Ish, Mecca, and C-Know to a space much closer to the thematic and stylistic focus of their raps.
Is It Really Real?
The 1993 rise of BK’s Boot Camp Clik and Staten Island’s Wu-Tang Clan vindicated the East Coast rap underground’s penchant for lo-fi production values and patently uncompromising rhyme styles. Rap’s acute sensitivity to the poignant, ironic, and surreal aspects of a very real urban experience ran wild in a Wu and BCC ruled New York. The broken language that arose from the dilapidated yet media-saturated ghettoes proclaimed a realist agenda while indulging in abstraction. Black Moon’s “I Gotcha Opin” describes the quest for mystic elevation, lyrical immortality, and corner notoriety in the sacred utterances of cipher ritual, while Wu-Tang’s “Can It Be All So Simple” showed that a similar “lyrical high” could manifest visions that were simultaneously nostalgic and disturbing, both coldly literal and irrepressibly emotional. The dense mist of outer-borough slang was rendered even more vexing when it was used to address, dissect, and enlarge upon the unexpectedly broad, kaleidoscopic frame of reference beheld by the ghetto child on the regular. Fervently ingested pulp novels, comic books, karate flicks, mixtapes, and funk 45s(all of which were often bootlegged or boosted), functioned as raw materials for interpreting and reshaping a most hectic reality. Digable Planets were hip to all of it. Records like 36 Chambers proved that a distinctly New York gutter sound could find a loyal audience in a Doggy Dogg world, providing Digable with the inspiration and license to free themselves of their past, go back to the lab, and flex an original, relevant style.
In this new scene, a probing, complex examination of the streets can amount to an aesthetic reinvention of hip-hop and vice-versa, so long as the beats are rugged and the raps are on point. What many critics seem to forget, or ignore, is that the guidelines that dictate the kind of sound that constitute a “rugged” beat and/or a dope rap are, much like the vagaries of urban existence, perpetually shifting and open to interpretation. Sometimes the “ghetto” consisted entirely of low-income housing projects, and sometimes it was expanded to incorporate the working-class neighborhoods surrounding the projects, and sometimes the newly black middle-class outskirts of town were included. The changeability of slang left its speakers without any exact standard to demarcate, for instance, which blocks in a given neighborhood were “ghetto” or “‘hood” or “rugged” and which were definitely “not.” The music that depicts these conditions was logically characterized by qualitative ambiguities; even in a climate where definite “sell-outs” were spotlighted and exiled without remorse, groups like Tribe remained rooted in a respectable though sometimes misunderstood middleground. In this context, the allegedly eccentric public image and sound of the Native Tongues and disciples like Digable fits much more neatly into the historical narrative of rap music. In the early ‘90s, there was room on the truckload of rap gold for three rappers once labeled as hippie has-beens to try again.
The most unforgivable crime of many critics of this time is that they appear to project their distaste for rap’s penetrating yet strategically fanciful depiction of the particularities of street life onto artists who defy obvious conventions, especially in their use of disparate and offbeat sample sources. The insidious implication was, and still is, that street kids who were eccentric enough to sit through Lou Reed records just to find a loop or write rhymes about talking alligators likely feel constrained by rap’s supposed musical limitations and secretly wish to broaden their appeal beyond a street culture that lacks the interpretive capacity to appreciate or even comprehend abstraction. In listening to Blowout Comb, one senses that Digable may have been angrily conscious of the suffocating injustice of their “Jazz Rap” and “Tribe lite” labels. If they were truly amateurish poseurs of the Stereo MCs caliber then they might have pulled a predictable De La Soul Is Dead stunt and denounced their darling status as the botched result of market pressures and critical fallacy. But rather than go out like Special Ed, the Digable Planets crafted an album that was knowingly responsive to hardcore taste-making, true to their evolving stylistic inclinations, and perhaps most importantly, refreshingly devoid of a legible pop sensibility. If outsiders were perplexed by the inclusion of DJ Jazzy Joyce’s club style toasting on the first single, “9th Wonder (Blackitolism),” which casually references a firearms manufacturer, cites the 120 Lessons, and extols the virtues of savings accounts, then all was good.
Politic Ditto
The loungy, inviting, easy listening vibe of Reachin’ gives way to the nearly dissonant muddy waters funk of Comb, which touches on moods both sinister and cheerful but remains rooted in a narcotic haze. Residual youthful proclivities (either actual or critically superimposed) towards radical psychedelica and true-to-life ghetto representation begin to mature into appreciably sincere, imaginative engagements with the block parties, corner stores, projects, and barbershops. The use of live instrumentation on a majority of the album’s tracks does little to render the music accessible or even melodic. The mixdown is reminiscent of RZA’s most beautifully fucked up work. The monstrous bass of “Graffiti,” which features a cameo from fellow BK grimy mic-wrecka Jeru the Damaja turns a club-ready rhythm into a sludge of cheap third generation Maxell dub quality, while the hook, a simple repetition of “Noise, noise, noise, noise” says it all and then some. Much like 36 Chambers or Enta Da Stage, Comb is a motley clash of sounds that celebrates boombox batteries-in-the-freezer ghetto ingenuity as a raw, empowered expression. In much the same spirit, Ladybug Mecca, Butterfly Ish, and C-Knowledge manipulate their learned street talk, itself a highly eclectic admixture, to document the chaotic yet vibrant city life that informs their sound. Partly inspired by the militaristic metaphors of the Boot Camp Clik, the trio troops through Medina wearing their inherited b-boy and b-girl swaggers as unburnable ghetto passes. As if the Planets were liberated by rap’s return to the streets, the Five Percenter and kung-fu references that are heard on Reachin’ are more fluidly and triumphantly incorporated into the lyrics of Comb.
The journey is undertaken with a nod to the outlaw ambition of subway graf bombin’ and the stoic purpose of Kung Fu Master’s meandering. This seriousness is regularly tempered by moments of thoughtful repose, childlike wonder, or even outright giddiness. On Reachin’ the Planets coolly note that they feel “good to be here” in technicolor NYC, but on Comb they are downright jubilant and exceedingly grateful to partake in the ’94 rap scene. The “7-od” squad frequently pauses for the cause to bask contemplatively in the“freshly-dipped state” that Butterfly describes on the unlikely manifesto/ down-tempo party groove “The Art of Easin’.” On the rolling, hypnotical “The May 4th Movement” the Planets shape super serious Five Percenter recitation rituals into their own point-by-point program, chanting “one time for your mind, twice times for Mumia and Sekou, thrice times for the Brooklyn dimes and it’s seven times for pleasure.” Whereas BCC commandos Smif-N-Wessun demand army-like discipline for their march, Digable advocates adherence to an ethos of wide-eyed awe and unhindered festivity. They observe, absorb, and rock the many styles of speak, gear, smoke, and sound that New York has to offer and incorporate the various shades of fresh into a stance that is strangely celebratory, wary, indulgent, and subversive. On “May 4th” Mecca speaks for the group when she unapologetically posits herself as a committed leftist “posin’ in B-girl freshness.” Think Jay-Z rhyming over a live jam band in a crisp Che Guevara tee; the whole concept might be cynically dismissed as a contrived, problematic, contradictory, even deceitful youthful expression, but truthfully, it’s too damn slick for that.
NYC Everything
Such ironically overconsumptive gestures gleefully anticipate the slang and couture fixations that run through Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and Ghostface Killah’s Ironman, and add fascinating layers of mystique to an already difficult listen. Just as Rae and Ghost’s vividly puzzling back-to-back rhyming develops and normalizes Rakim’s highly bizarre godbody-mafioso microphone persona, the confusion and camouflage of Comb works to illuminate rap’s seemingly contradictory stances and images. On the pitch black “Borough Check” (which like Smif-N-Wessun’s “Home Sweet Home” samples generous portions of Roy Ayers’ “We Live in Brooklyn, Baby”) Butter declares that he is “all city” when “dipped,” conferring the subversive potential of grafitti’s subterranean broadcast onto new wears and fly kicks. In the world of Digable Planets, meticulous style can embody brash rebellion, and is not simply read as a symbol of corporate-engineered conformist complacency. The colors and textures of the redeemed inner-city, teeming with creative and revolutionary potential, are reflected in the carefully chosen apparel of its inhabitants. In this light, recent chastisements of rap’s designer label obsessions, some of which go so far as to theorize a direct link between the purchasing of expensive loungewear and the perpetuation of inner-city poverty and violence, seem laughably myopic and far-fetched. The lyrics of Blowout Comb provide excellent counter-arguments to that reactionary and reductive line of reasoning because the LP’s release precedes this debate and the hasty establishment of its terms. More importantly, the flash and flair of Blowout Comb is not predictably limited to the mere mention of pricey items.
Draped in everything brand new and fresh but equipped with elder wisdom and historical consciousness, the Digable Planets are most at home “for delf roamin’ the New York borough.” On the closing ad-libs of “The Art of Easin’” Butterfly, portraying a Boot Campian drill sergeant, schools his troops on proper attire, which unlike the strict timbs and hoodies uniform of Smif-N-Wessun includes Guess, ‘Lo, and Wallabees in addition to standard issue urban camo. The defined mission, which is also articulated in rhyme by C-Know on “May 4th,” and at countless points throughout the album, is to speak perfect slang and emulate the chillest villains of Blaxploitation, to be slick yet gutter, to look fresh but remain largely unseen. Such stylistic mobility is significant because it establishes Digable’s movement through the streets as an unpretentious plea for citywide unity and poetic UNIversality. ??Comb??’s reverent allusions to rap’s old school records and hip-hop’s earliest days, coupled with the mock New Leftist grassroots newsletter format of the inset suggests that the Planets might well have aligned themselves with Afrika Bambaataa’s social program of reforming and revitalizing a dangerously divisive gang culture, had they not been in grade school at the time. Even the frequent outbursts of pro-Crooklyn rah-rah assist in exporting a translatable message of peaceful coexistence and most importantly, freedom of movement.
At the very least, the Planets demonstrate a remarkable awareness of the dreams and struggles of their late ‘70s and early ‘80s forefathers. On “May 4th” Ish rhymes that he “makes soul darts” and “covers mad areas” in his “crepe-soled Clarks,” smartly namedropping the resurrected formal yet comfortable footwear that allowed b-boys and girls to navigate freely between uptown park jams and downtown clubs in the Sugar Hill/Enjoy! era. On Comb, the beloved Brooklyn borough, and by extension the city as a whole, is lovingly depicted in all of its wondrous microcosmic complexity as a place of convergence and collusion. On “Jettin’” Brooklyn is the chill “ep swinga’s lounge-out spot,” and elsewhere it is the dynamic birthplace of “horn loopers,” and a perilous land governed by the credos of “do or die” and “show and prove.” On the ethereal, guitar-driven, seven-minute ode to identity formation and apocalyptic rhetoric “Black Ego,” Ladybug Mecca teasingly dares d-evils to “check me in another place, space, and joy.” The deceptive levity of her delivery betrays the grave awareness of fratricide and stifling oppression that is present throughout the record. The purposeful revisiting of the highly appealing fantasy of a traversable, united city lovingly exploits rap’s wistfully fictionalized remembrance of the pre-Crack Wars block party utopia. However, Digable Planets are seldom content to limit their depiction of Brook-nam to a solidly realistic narrative of the here and now, and they are similarly reluctant to remain immersed in escapism.
“No Quittin’ or Getting’ Chumped By The System”
At times, Comb functions as a reminder that hip-hop’s park jam era tended to eschew downtown gloss in favor of dirty, improvisational, risky fun, and that the social ills that plagued the first generation of b-boys continue to fester unabated. For all intents and purposes, Digable Planets exist in the same historical moment as KRS-One, Kool Herc, George Jackson and Malcolm X. The references to these figures, and numerous others, can be rightfully interpreted as markers of a sincere engagement with contemporary social realities as well as the signposts of a highly stylized form of poetry. For Digable, rapping is a political act unto itself, so it makes sense that amidst the seemingly standard braggadocio of “Easin’ we hear Ish characterize himself as a “lil’ Panther” who parlays in the same spot where Malcolm once stood. During some of the album’s lightest, breeziest moments, we bear witness to deadly serious militance. On “May 4th” Ladybug talks of letting bullets fly in the direction of COINTELPRO, on the blissful “Dog It” Ish reminds us that the Planets “got ammunition for the streets,” while the album’s second single “Dial 7” invokes the Nation of Islam’s famous “It’s Nation Time!” chant while instructing listeners to “point our heaters the other way.” This affinity for the menacing sloganeering of radical politics is sporadically apparent on Reachin’ but it is not fully realized and cleverly snuck into the mix until Blowout Comb.
Listeners who are drawn to the album’s laid back atmosphere should be aware that the Planets utilize the expansive, transcendent power of language and style to report, sometimes impartially and sometimes polemically, on many different aspects of urban life and politics. Even the word “Blowout” might well refer to ‘fros, guns, blunts, streetball, reed instruments, or all of the above; the language of the record is often cryptic and ambiguous but it is rarely paralyzing. Whether Ish’s love for “culture-power” (45 RPM) records is also a sly reference to a handgun’s caliber in a moment where “freedom had a pistol,” or his reminiscence of “Lee flavors” refers to the multicolored straight-leg jeans worn by the cast of Wildstyle or to the straight letter graf styling of Lee Quinones himself, or whether Ladybug derives her name from Lady Pink’s character in that same live break-beat propelled film—this is all ultimately besides the point. The beauty and worth of Comb’s language and music rests in enigmatic interpretability. The record evades critical pigeonholing with such slickness that it is perhaps fitting that Comb received such scant attention at the time. Arriving long before the rise of the bland, mainstream-approved pseudo-genre/ideology “Neo-Soul” assisted critics in dividing rap further into “positive” (headwrap) and “negative” (bling) camps, Comb and other LPs of its era inhabit a space far too real, too inclusive to be constrained by such hopelessly oversimplified classifications.
Comments for "How Digable Planets Straight New Yorked You"
peace
— Ben Oct 1, 07:17 PM
— Bob Oct 6, 02:09 PM
— R.H.S. Oct 8, 12:40 AM
I am actually Posdnuos.
Oh wait, fuck.
— Bob Oct 10, 04:47 PM
— R.H.S. Oct 11, 08:06 PM
— David Oct 12, 11:42 PM
— juli Nov 5, 09:38 AM
— juli Nov 7, 08:01 AM
— Rafi Nov 7, 09:42 AM
— Mister Sinister Nov 17, 03:53 PM
Agreed, Mister Sinister. I was starting to get down reading through these comments of people that people just don’t seem to get Dig Plans. They’ve been hot since Reachin’, and took it off the charts for Blowout. I’ve seen them live on the last tour, and yes they’re on point, but their studio work is equally as dynamic—certainly not monotone. In an industry where there’s a lot of crap and same ‘ol is rewarded with radio play and record sales, I gladly welcome artists with half the talent and substance as Digable Planets. Fingers crossed for the rumored new album…
— trey Jan 9, 01:33 AM