The Coolest Breeze: Bass, Jazz & Pizazz

"The mind is time, the mind is space..."

I started out excavating paramount Hip-Hop records (technically, records being released before millennium) back in February, 2020. It was practically the frame of time when the tenacious viruses were about to call the shots on planet Earth. As the word-by-mouth theory explained, us juveniles are vicariously obsessed with gadgets of the forebear generations, thereupon such quintessential posses as EPMD, Public Enemy, and Boot Camp Clik took turns to reign my iPod playlists. Almost as equivelently the tweet-blogger Walter Biggins once wrote, "Coolness is essential at that age (as teenagers of pubertal stage)." Simply put, digging into classic records for a 15-year-old young kid like me was both a pastime for killing exuberant leisure time and an escapisml for demonstrating my 'unique' music tastes which set certain cliques apart from the peers. Me myself surely enjoyed those afternoon time spent on searching for critically-acclaimed on-the-ground records or cult-classic underground releases across the Internet, even a small nibble of serendipity like a sing-songy hook or a smashing punchline would make my entire day.

Hip-Hop has long been a community-based culture, and the locus of which is to get people mentally and somatically involved. I would not evade to confess that I've got special fixations for records consisting of sharp delivery and boogie-jive groove. One can't avoid talking about De La Soul, Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest when entering the realm of Conscious-Rap. The Low End Theory later then turned out to be hitting the sweet spot of my musical orientation, alongside with Q-Tip's sage words that pithily reveal the flip-side of American society and the troublesome street politics, the jazz-flavored subtle groove flows within the mezzainine of the track sequence was gorgeously arresting to me. After trillion times of listening, it has insofar become my all-time-favorite jazz-rap playback. The upshot was that the record framed high-end criteria for homogenious styles of sound, and since when I found it tough to even seek for a replacement comparable to Theory.

The crew Digable Planets broke into my radar chart completely out of sight. Accidentally as the instant as I pounded out "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like That)" with my boombox on a sultry evening, I felt like getting beamed up onto a flying saucer cruising at Warp Six--everything sounded so fresh-n-clean yet obscure synchronously. What Planets first gave me a buzz was basically a sequence of bassline--an intriguing, mesmerizing, in-your-face stream of bass grenade that straightforward flickered through my cerebrum tissue. And then went the crispy finger-snaps, the funky drum-kicks, the slick horns, and when the crew's frontman Butterfly was eventually warmed-up to deliver his very verse, I was already hooked-on. The crew worked as a well-functioning unit, Butterfly being intellectually lyrical, Doodlebug's street-wise pizazz, and Ladybug is smooth like suede. At the end of the day I couldn't even make sure that I grasped their metaphors, slang-tricks and every other bit they spit, but the integral vibe here was just tight and different, which sort of shook my gestalt as a hip-hop-layman.

Later I reckoned that discovering the four-man-crew was like encountering Rosetta Stone. Before DPs hit me with those exhilarating posse-cuts, say, "Where I'm From," and "Escapism (Gettin' Free)," my conception towards the term 'Hip-Hop' was basically one-man game: MCs spitting rhymes on the main stage, DJs cooking beats in the backstage. Those two tracks brought me onto a shuttle channeling across a kaleidoscope where emcees and all the other compounds of the background would fuse together and operate as a superorganism, and that's what the culture is about: mass involvement. The truth must be clarified that it indeed took me a long while to ultimately get rid off the stereotypical conclusion--Planets were dead ringers for Tribe fellows. Yet it doesn't even matter to argue about whether Planets plagiarized the styles from Tribe. Well, all we need to consent is that the both crews possessed their own shticks and they had been executing them perfectly well. Massly influenced by affirmative campaigns (Black Panther Party and 5% Nation) and the state-of-the-art systems (Afrocenturism and Conscious-Rap uprise), while juicing a bit of pabulum from their ideological heroes (Sartre, Camus and Karl Marx), the Brooklyn-borough-based quartet packaged themselves within the freshed-out concepts as exo-planet insects coming down to Earth to convey their messages. Now you may poke your suspicions here: was Digable Planets a paradoxical concept? How could the crew members be at once outer-space-aliens and Brooklyn natives? Why did they characterize themselves as caterpillars but still spit rhymes like homosapiens?

Tentatively skimming the album cover and you may notice that the closely wowen roots predominate almost half of the cover's mainstay--a tricky innuendo to their so-called African roots. The crew also took the album title from an essay written by Jorge Luis Borges (originally goes 'Nueva refutación del tiempo'), with their objectivity of transcending the limit of time-space continuum. I'm not talking about oxymoron or stuff like that, the record is being retrospective and futuristic at the same time, so is the development of African-American music chain. "Projects, tenements, pyramids," quoted Doodlebug, the crew bent their backs for speaking ghetto-tongues at once broadcasting their outlook for an ideal utopia.

Apropos of their jazz-influenced side, the crew has been constantly paying homage to masters from Ornette Coleman to Max Roacher. Most importantly, Silkworm--the manipulator behind the curtain, extracted the essence of jazz: coolness, freeness, and coziness, as well liberated the imageries of African-American music going down in history captivated by mono-tone graphics, which made the tunes and groove on this one extremely cultured and relatable. Come and embrace the jazz power shower and the nickel bag of funk and you would truly dig the essence of the insect tribe.

Planets weren't solely grounded by music itself. The triumphant single "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like That)" won them a hard-earned Grammy trophy. As a rather underrated group in Hip-Hop's history, it was practically a surprising anomaly to ever emerged throughout the culture's history. And here's what the frontman Butterfly discoursed on the acceptance speech that night, "We behalf of Hip-Hop music, black culture in general. We were like, for everybody to think about--the people right outside are still homeless. You sitting on these 900$ seats, 300$ seats, they not out there eating at all. Also, we'd like to say, to the universal black family, that one day we gon' recognize our true enemy. When we gonna stop attacking each other, maybe then we'll get some changes going on." It was the energy of raw black consciousness that brought people from ghettos and projects up together. Even as an outsider to the African-American culture, I would tip my hat for those words, of course.

Speaking of my infatuation for the record, one of the main reasons that I would to this record to my grave is that it remains humble all the time. While the Compton gangsters were still stuck in the throes of mob trifles and their camaraderies done balling out kept flaunting their hubris and jeweleries, the Planets hung low from the "A-list" game. They exhibited another dimly lit dimension of Hip-Hop battlefield and proved their own approach for obtaining commercial success with deep-cut gems. It also taught me a life-learning lesson that one is in contention for the possibility to be coronated while remaining low-key and being weirdos himself.

And Reachin' was the one and only pearl jam they ever produced, since then the crew had switched their course to accomplish their metamorphosis on their sophomore project--Blowout Comb. No more jazz-samples were used to create more solid sound, and they were no longer intellectual aliens but proletariats entrenched from low-rises uptown. By not claiming that its descendant wasn't cool or polished-sounding, what made Reachin' so unparalleled was the foresightedness, alienness, and blackness fantasized by four fledging young black youths. Yet there's still no one to blame. Their coolness may fade out, but the coolest breeze is never killed. A+

References

Robert Christgau on Reachin' (Consumer Guide 90s)

Sheldon Pearce on Reachin' (Pitchfork Reissue Review)

Walter Biggins on Reachin' (33-3/1 B-Sides)