The long-awaited album offers mostly spoken-wordpieces backed by a patchwork of lo-fi, dancehall-ish blues. The blips, synthsand echoing booms indicate that someone in the studio knew their way around ProTools, and as an underlying theme the soundscape works: modern, moody, like thebacking on the spookier sections of TheMatrix. Alongside there’s also modern soul on “I’ll Take Care of You,”acoustic finger-picking blues on the simple, painful title track, and aglorious hand-clapped hip-hopper, “New York Is Killing Me.” Add a peppering ofphilosophical interludes (some jokey, some dark, none very consequential) and acurious update of Robert Johnson, and you have a 2010 portrait of one of thetrue godfathers of rap.
Consistent, not quite. But cohesive? That’s anotherthing. Through simple conviction, GSH conveys the from-the-hip urbancomplexities of a street-corner prophet, at best waxing like a modern-day LeRoiJones, or at least Ishmael Reed. It’s the sound of a poet of the streetreturning to the studio, cataloging recent demons and time-earned lessons,reminding us as he once did, “the revolution will not be televised,” butoffering it up in 21st-century-friendly, digital form.
