“Hip hop isn’t as complex as a woman is.” – Talib Kweli

“I grew up around hip-hop so I didn’t think it was about being cool or being black or being white or whatever.” – Chad Hugo

“The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it’s like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it’ll be a hip-hop song. That’s the only music you can do that with.” – Talib Kweli

“Personally, I just think rap music is the best thing out there, period. If you look at my deck in my car radio, you’re always going to find a hip-hop tape; that’s all I buy, that’s all I live, that’s all I listen to, that’s all I love.” – Eminem

“I not only wanted to showcase lyrical skills but also continue to drop knowledge on the hip hop community. I’m looking to elevate through my music, and through my music I educate.” – Talib Kweli

“Rap music is the only vital form of music introduced since punk rock.” – Kurt Cobain

“The thing about hip-hop is that it’s from the underground, ideas from the underbelly, from people who have mostly been locked out, who have not been recognized.” – Russell Simmons

“So I think hip-hop is moving and is going to continue to move in the direction of rappers just being honest with themselves, whether you’re talking about Common and Mos Def or Nas and 50 Cent.” – Talib Kweli

“The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart, it’s insightful. The way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable.” – Barack Obama

Everyone with an interest of any sort in hip hop, anyone who feels something at stake within the genre for them, owes a debt to the classic 1980s albums that fuelled the very explosion of the genre in the mid to late 80s. Thus, said people all owe a debt to “Critical Beatdown.” I mean, hip hop itself aside, this record is essentially directly responsible for The Prodigy for one, as a listen will reveal. The colorful, oft-guitar driven production of Ced-Gee is innovative and highly engaging throughout. The lyrical display is at the very end of the evolutionary scale for 1980s hip hop, most notably from the now somewhat canonized Kool Keith, with words taking surprise left turns through the mindfield, giving the weird and wonderful prevalence over any conscious/gangsta mannerisms, and multiple rhyme schemes that have seemingly played scholar to the best MCs of the genre’s history.

Compared to something like the overrated and frequently dull “Straight Outta Compton,” “Critical Beatdown” acts as a quirkier, calmer, but nonetheless excitable cousin to “It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back,” the truly crucial instalment in the 1988 rap zeitgeist. All the same, in shooting for entertainment it is true to itself, and retains an excellence and individuality that remains a lesson to us all in the year 2010. Clearly, over time, many an important individual has considered that kind of lesson to be well worth taking. That is something worth celebrating.

by Michael

Everyone remember Super Mario 64 for the N64? Remember how you would access levels by jumping through paintings? Pretty cool, wasn’t it? Well, imagine the same, but with album covers. I challenge you to find me an album cover whose world you would like to jump into less than “Streetcleaner’s”, which bears a cavernous, unthinkably huge inferno, set to extinguish a collection of helpless, crucified bodies. This, ladies and gentlemen, is as low as it goes. This is hellishly low.

A few weeks back, I wrote up “Through Silver In Blood” by Neurosis, a bleak write-up for a bleak album. “Streetcleaner” makes it sound like a birthday party. With a heaviness that seems capable of disrupting the Earth from its orbit of the sun, lyrics that come off as if written (and excruciatingly delivered) by someone in an ongoing process of awful brain damage, or at the very least inhuman suffering, and a drum machine that is arguably the most depressive thing here as it seems to bleed out its final, dying and almost lifeless beats, this could makes Joy Division shit themselves.

Yes, the fiction that is reviews of “Streetcleaner” rejects the imagery of slow suicide that “Through Silver In Blood” so effortlessly plays off, instead focusing on the consequences of that. Its primary conceit is centred around dead bodies, often used as peripheral and almost inconsequential decorations, or being used to power machinery that eats and slays more and more people, perhaps in order to power the utterly mechanical riffs of tracks like the horrific opening pair of “Like Rats” and “Christbait Rising.” The tracks in the middle section of the album are droning, relentless epics of guitar noise, and somehow there is a beauty to them! There should be no beauty to this, because, make no mistakes, there is no hope. Once the title track comes in with a marching drum-line and grinding riffs, the cycle of building you up to methodically slice you back down is complete. If you’re used to the hair on the back of your neck standing up when listening to expansive metal, prepare here to instead be weighed down with the weariness of a black hole.

Regardless of whatever price Justin Broadrick sold his soul for to open this particular door, you know it was worth it for the pantheon of arty metal it has since birthed. This influenced everything from the post-metal that sounds so much like his own later Jesu project to the fragmented pop music of Nine Inch Nails, and the industrial strength putridity of “Streetcleaner” has never been matched for sound and style. Albums that cannot be weighed up or genuinely cannot be compared to any other are very rare. “Streetcleaner” sears its own line between itself and all others, a bloodstained line of screaming, society-baiting guitar fire. Consider the streets cleaned at a devastating cost.

by Michael