Edan
Beauty and the Beat

THE REVIEW

Edan is a young man from Boston raised on bread, Beatles, Hendrix, and... old school. As a child, he even tried his hand at the guitar, but hip hop is his true passion... he strums the strings, but he wishes to be in front of the decks scratching and sampling, he studies chords, but in the meantime, he starts collecting stacks of vinyl from the rap pioneers. A true admiration and devotion he has for Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy and Rakim, Beastie Boys, NWA, and Big Daddy Kane. He is white, a DJ, a producer, an MC, and much more. Predominantly, he feeds on black music; he’s omnivorous of anything that can be traced back to early-style rap, funk-blaxpoitation, soul, but he also very much likes psychedelic rock and electronic music with which he enjoys sampling everything and experimenting.

After gaining experience in the Boston underground, mostly through CDs distributed at the end of his nights, his career took off, first in England, thanks to Lewis Recordings, only to then make the reverse journey and (re)reach the other side of the ocean. "Beauty and the Beat" is not the usual hip hop record, it's much more; it's an excellent rap, old school music album, one of the best I've heard in recent years (just from the title one should understand something about his approach to music and what to expect...), made in 2005, with everything that entails, technological hybridization included.
Irreverent sound alchemist, he moves with ease and naturalness between the funk of "Funky Voltron" and "The Science of the Two", in both of which Insight, another MC from the Boston posse, is guest; and the jazz of "Murder Mystery".
The mind-blowing "Torture Chambers", with a vaguely Floydian flavor (in my opinion, the sample underneath is from "Brain Damage"...) and the hypnotic kraut-rock-esque "Rock and Roll".

If it's true that Madlib is the deus ex-machina of the "new hip hop scene," the enlightened MC, the top of the class, if Prefuse 73 is the producer of the moment, the one who can boast the greatest number of collaborations, among the most diverse, the one who has reduced to a minimum the distance between electronic and hip-hop, I think Edan can calmly sit next to the aforementioned to complete the fateful podium.