Milwaukee rapper Reggie Bonds says he made The Black Tape: A Black Ass Rap Album with a mind to remember the kids who love hip-hop but can’t afford a computer and microphone to make their own. If those aspiring M.C.s can’t spring for the tools of the music they want to make, they may need to obtain Bonds’ latest by means other than purchasing it for the $111.11 its creator is asking for the LP or cassette (with bonus stickers and T-shirt).
The exclusivity Bonds initiates by way of his price point and the street-level aggression and empathy he spits throughout Tape’s 16 tracks helps to animate his attempt at making a Capital S Statement. Reverence and blasphemy, a fierce love for his single mother that contrasts with antipathy for a wife-beating father (with a call for other African American dads to do their job) and a non-doctrinaire, racially motivated radicalism coexisting with a youthful tender-heartedness number among other conflicting-complementary emotions.
None of his couplings would be as impressive, however, were the sonic atmospheres not up to matching the poetic wordplay. Bonds’ facilely rhymes in a breadth of styles recalling Kendrick Lamar or Kanye West at their most militaristically severe pivots to a deceptively casual attack that brings to mind Gang Starr’s Guru Keithy E. Producer/turntablist Gray 11 harnesses Bonds’ words to tracks adeptly manipulated samples from R&B, jazz and other genres. Dropped-in are spoken snippets from a panoply of black celebrities and thinkers—Martin Luther King Jr. even merits a collab’ credit. Whether one pays full price for it or listens by other means (good luck there?!), the grasp Bonds achieves in Tape pretty well matches its author’s ambitious artistic reach.
