The best political rap tells hard truths. The worst tells obvious truths. Mr. Lif's new album, I Heard It Today, out today, tells the most obvious truths of all, the ones that are plastered above the fold on newspaper and stream 24-hours a day on cable news scrolls.
Apparently, there's some sort of economic crisis.
There's a great album to be made exploring the roots and the personal impact of the Great Recession, but this isn't it. With zero insight, little compassion and no proposed solutions, Mr. Lif raps about America's many, many problems with "I told you" smarminess, rattling off a long list of woes: we're stressed and disillusioned, bills are piling up, home owners are on the streets, the economy is hemorrhaging jobs, corporations are crumbling, we're at war—and, of yeah, racism is rampant and Bush was a prick. We know these things, but Lif can't resist telling us again and again, rubbing our face in it. Like an overlong Keith Olbermann special comment, or a Drudge Report red siren flagging the latest bleak economic data, the whole record reeks of schadenfreude.
