Deltron 3030
Deltron 3030
[75 Ark]
Rating: 8.8
Del tha Funkee Homosapien has, for years, been widely regarded as King of the
Oddball Rappers. Lugging the backpack long before there was a codified arty
hip-hop scene, Del sneaked onto the radio, clinging by his fingernails to
cousin Ice Cube's Chuck Taylor strings. Of course, even his hard-rock relative
was befuddled by the Sapien's giddy spirals of abstract, meaningless verbiage.
"Del," queried Cube on his oddball cuz's debut, "What the fuck is a Funkee
Homosapien?"
What the fuck, indeed. Del was never shy when it came to flaunting his
restless MC intellect, favoring elaborate puns and encyclopedic vocabulary
over, like, meaning. The classic example of this, naturally, is Del's first
single, 1991's "Mistadobalina." The track served as a lengthy put-down on
some guy named Mr. Bob Dobalina, about whom very little was clear except that
Del found him a little silly.
Del has always seemed irritated at having to address the real world, and as
such, his best verses are completely divorced from it. For the most part,
his last few albums have kept things defiantly surreal, which is great fun,
but also chafes the listener. Surely, a lyricist with Del's heavy-duty
intelligence has interesting thoughts to share about something other than how
cool he and his friends are. It seemed we'd never know... until now.
Paired with the Automator, the Kool Keith-embraced-and-scorned poet laureate
of creepy, oppressive beats, Del has finally sent himself where he belonged to
begin with: outer space. On Deltron 3030, he unravels an album-length
narrative about the titular year, in which he's a superhero named Deltron Zero
(a plot not entirely dissimilar from that of RZA's Bobby Digital).
Armed with his two sidekicks, the Automator (here saddled with the unfortunate
sobriquet "The Cantankerous Captain Aptos") and scratch mastermind Kid Koala
(aka "Skiznod the Boy Wonder"), Deltron-Z combs the galaxy, supporting his
secretive Earthling existence by participating in weird rap battles where
one's rhymes summon psychic powers that physically damage the opponent.
At least, that's what may be going on. Like most hip-hoperas, there's not
much stock placed in narrative coherence here. Fortunately, the plot setup--
delivered by a deliciously, almost impossibly bored-sounding Damon Albarn--
gives way to a loose set of ruminations on a myriad of subjects. Of course,
the rap-battle set pieces afford Del plenty of time to lavish attention to
his favorite subject: how cool he is in relation to you and any poor soul
who would dare challenge his verbal supremacy.
But, allowed room to imagine a whole world, many of Deltron 3030's
most impressive tracks show our hero exploring a wide-ranging variety of
surprisingly weighty topics. The future is imagined from the bottom up: Del
lives in a secret lair in the Bay Area, unbothered by exorbitant rents while
the world around him falls to pieces. The Earth is run by a select,
superwealthy oligarchy who have consigned the underclasses to rot away. (Yes,
this is the future.) The environment's in ruins, there's fighting in the
streets, and Paul Barman gets a speaking role. In short, things are in bad
shape.
Such dire straits reveal Del as a surprisingly acute social critic. He even
lacks a New York protest MC's frustrating tendency towards self-righteousness,
instead favoring targets that actually deserve his wrath: he wants to destroy
corporate control and "convert them to papyrus," mostly, and his oppressed
underclass is racially diverse. Like the man says, "It's not about separation/
It's about the population." He resents the appropriation of hip-hop, but not
necessarily by palefaces. He just doesn't like biters because they're messing
with the genre's chances of being taken seriously.
In the end, that's the most exciting thing about Deltron 3030. Though
never self-satisfied or deliberately obscure, the record is an infinite
improvement over the wanky verbal gymnastics that currently crowd smug,
jerk-off rappers' 12-inches. Though Del may have helped start that trend,
here he aches to say something significant. In places-- like the sad, almost
Gothic "Madness," the album's masterful centerpiece-- he even succeeds. Now
liberated from the obnoxious demands of everyday reality, he's finally found
a way to say something meaningful about it.
-Sam Eccleston