RJD2
Deadringer

I admit it, after realizing that twenty years have passed since 2002, I was a bit surprised. Two decades is quite a long time, during which many things change: aesthetic tastes, fashions, political parties (which pop up like mushrooms and dissolve like snow in the sun). And if two decades are not a short time for our lives, imagine for music, especially if produced with electronic equipment subject to continuous updates and revisions.

Technological evolution, in particular, has caused the aging of sounds that were acclaimed not only by the public but also by certain specialist press (I think of the terrible Ruff Ryders and much of the commercial hip-hop that came out around the year 2000). Fortunately, not everything has been lost; indeed, there are records that have passed the test of time with flying colors, works for which it is not inappropriate to talk about "classics" because they are capable of gaining value when compared to the present.

Deadringer by RJD2 can be inserted into this category. The debut of Ramble John Crohn, a producer from Columbus, Ohio, has lost very little of its splendor and, besides confirming the foresight of Def Jux (a label that marked the underground of the early millennium), can be further appreciated if compared to some current offerings (I'm referring to the contemporary rap/trap universe).

If young producers often use synthetic and cheap sounds, RJD2 makes a different choice and decides to loot samples everywhere, ranging from funk to soul, from blues to psychedelic rock, not neglecting magnificent vocal samples and dialogues from noir and police films. The latter, especially, give Deadringer a visual or narrative touch, which is not wrong to define as cinematic.

Someone might say those were different times, and they would be right: the nineties had just ended, instrumental hip-hop was going strong, and the lesson imparted by DJ Shadow in Endtroducing..... was still fresh and tangible; yet, after being overwhelmed by the unsettling progress of the single "The Horror", one cannot help but feel nostalgic for that period. A time when the beatmaker seemed like a gold seeker, always lost among markets and vinyls from which to draw the right inspiration.

The name DJ Shadow was not mentioned by chance: RJD2, in fact, resembles a more aggressive and distinctly hip-hop Josh Davis. Also, like the Californian DJ, he creates an almost entirely instrumental album, where rap is confined to only three tracks (my favorite is "The Final Frontier", with that irresistible "the show is over" and the rhymes of Blueprint, Crohn's partner in the Soul Position project).

The rest is a kaleidoscope where we find everything: wild tracks like "Good Times Roll, Part 2", but also hypnotic compositions ("Silver Fox"), introspective moments, and even melancholic, at times moving, tracks (the beautiful "Smoke & Mirrors").

Noteworthy are "Ghostwriter", with its alternation of soft and epic passages, and the bizarre "Chicken-Bone Circuit", a mix of nervous drums and ambient backdrops that reveals another characteristic of Deadringer: the willingness to push beyond the boundaries of the genre.

It might seem like the description of a perfect album, yet there are some flaws, primarily the slightly excessive length (sixteen tracks for sixty-seven full minutes). No worries, these are trifles that barely scratch an excellent work, absolutely valid after so much time.

In conclusion, the death staged by RJD2 on the cover is just a joke, a Tarantino-esque prank: what is killed here is the "lookalike" of true hip-hop, that bad taste always ready to strike, yesterday as today. And achieving this result is a work that is difficult to define strictly as "hip-hop", an evocative collage of moods that, in my opinion, can be remembered as one of the best debuts of the new century.

DeRecensore's Rating: 4.5