New Kingdom
Paradise Don't Come Cheap

Under the cap, nothing?

I don't know what Winston Churchill meant when he said: "He has all the virtues I detest and none of the vices I admire", but this aphorism certainly sums up better than any other what I think of the rap and hip hop produced in the last fifteen years, with some exceptions, rare birds that can be counted on the fingers of two hands, with some to spare. The era of rap has become "systematized", repetitive, stale, and biodegradable, in a word: harmless. And many thanks to MTV. (What a pity. Just over a decade ago, I was struck on the road to Harlem and Compton by a music I had never heard before, the Last Poets I had only seen in books and were therefore indispensable Cicero on the backward journey to discover the wonders of the entire black culture. In short, a revolution, unlike anything I had felt since the punk era, whether it was the hard, pure, and militant style of Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy, and Paris, which moved the ghetto from the set of Colors into the grooves of Erik B. & Rakim, N.W.A, and Gang Starr or the colorful and freakadelic style of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and Jungle Brothers. Three things they shared: tight busta rhymin', killer rhythmic breaks that "stole" from the Great Fathers here and there but, above all, that ineffable quid that, often abused but not in this case, is called "creativity").

One of the reasons why fingers remain at the aforementioned count might perhaps lie in the fact that two black bohemian Brooklynites, Nosaj and DJ Sebastian, who got together in art as New Kingdom, inexplicably stopped making records since 1996, the year when their paradise not meant for all pockets was released. No one better than these twenty-year-later replicas straight out of "Shaft" managed to describe their work: "Outer space hip hop", Mr. Master of Ceremonies Nosaj astutely and critically noted, adding to better illustrate his point: "We sound like Run DMC crashing head-on with Black Sabbath, on their way to see AC/DC, and affecting Curtis Mayfield's trailer in the clash, right in the heart of Cypress Hill territory". All true, that is to say, false. In the sense that, if it goes well, we're halfway there. Therefore, Sebastian, the hyena-haired fellow, echoed behind the decks, half Rastafarian and half Doctor J: "We’re like a convoy of semi-trucks, as the convoy proceeds it picks up everyone who wants to be there, growing more and more massive until it becomes unstoppable". Just one name among those picked up on the road, perhaps not typically referenced by a posse? I've got it, Captain Beefheart. Do you think I'm crazy?

Try classifying these barely fifty minutes of dark sonic magma as dark as only matter from the center of the Earth can be. To tar everything, a molten lava stream that makes the encounter between black and white subgenres of Run DMC and Aerosmith a prehistoric and one-dimensional artifact. And what a thing it is! Psychedelic, gluey funky spun at 16 RPM (Horse latitudes, Big 10 half) or at...22 and ½ (Paradise don't come cheap and Co-Pilot, stuff like this, even Public Enemy hasn't managed), slow-motion hard rock that makes speakers and walls tremble (Kickin' like Bruce Lee and Suspended in air, the Sabbaths of Harlem), very dark and slowed down para-grind specters (Valhalla Soothsayer, Terror Mad Visionary) acid-soaked trip-hop (Animal, the meeting of Tricky and the most off Funkadelic, those of Maggott Brain), even unheard openings of progressive magnificence (Unicorn were horses, astounding in their reference to an impossible outtake from The lamb lies down on Broadway). In short, a journey more "hallucinatory" than hallucinatory, from the Mexico of the first track (Mexico or bust, Barry White in hippie attire, vacationing in the desert with Cypress Hill) to the Sun of the last (Journey to the sun, a sun that indeed has the characteristics of a black hole...), passing through hell (Shining armor), a not very divine Comedy that proceeds through those Dantean circles encountering the damned souls mentioned above and many other unsuspected, all wasted and subjected to the creative "treatments" and disconcerting irony of the duo, which at certain moments can go beyond by creating sketches of brilliant and "Zappa-esque" mockery.

Who might it be, for example, the Animal that Nosaj declares as his favorite drummer, in a track that sequentially mentions Cobain, Hendrix, and Miles Davis? A friend who died from drugs? A victim of rival gang fights? But no, it's dedicated to the drummer of the Muppet Show. Silly us for not thinking of it sooner. And even when they have to pay homage to some Noble Father of black music, the two do it in their way, see the James Brown revered at the beginning of Half Asleep with an invaluable: "Say it loud, I'm freak and I'm proud!". So much, so much stuff. Unfortunately, no more sequels.

Therefore, having established that paradise will not come cheap, it's probably not worth feeling too sorry. In hell, spending much less, I will surely have much more fun. Kicking like Bruce Lee