The Music Next Door...

#110 Black Eyed Peas - Behind the Front

“Let your body collide to the rhythm provided / By the mindstate affairs classified and make your / Heat up and flare I swear / A serenade, a soul, and so beware / And what’s happening here, seek one to help you / Feeling a piece of mind, let your spine unwind / Maybe in time you can stop this crime / But until then, yo, I’m-a rock a rhyme”

Let’s get something straight first: anyone who says that the Black Eyed Peas were really good until Fergie showed up is a fucking idiot. As much as I like this album and its followup (Bridging the Gap), their tasteful neo-bohemian, chilled-out jazz-rap really pales in comparison to the energy and enthusiasm displayed on Elephunk, which aside from the Papa Roach (who?) collaboration (and ‘Where is the Love?’ I guess, which I liked the first time I heard it, before radio managed to kill anyone enjoyment I could have possibly extracted out of it), is by far their best album.

I guess this album is best defined as ‘music white people like’. See, to the middle-aged liberal yuppie, hip-hop is scary - there’s a cognitive dissonance between their white liberal guilt, and the crude, rawness of the music itself. These people long for a return to the times when African-Americans produced inoffensive jazz and r’n’b marketed for white audiences; when black music, was slick, polished, catchy. This album fulfils those criteria (except for the catchy bit) - ‘conscious hip-hop’ I think it used to be referred to.

Anyway, the beats are good - jazzy, ‘organic’ - but kind of dull. There’s also a painful lack of hooks, with ‘Joints and Jams’ being the only song that’s really memorable. It’s background music really; it sounds nice, but nothing really sticks with you.

The other thing to note is that these guys are really bad rappers. I’ve often seen them compared to A Tribe Called Quest, which is a bit over-complementary really. Sure Q-Tip and Phife were never technically brilliant rappers, but they certainly were interesting. BEP, on the other hand, are not. You have will.i.am (no introduction needed), who has an extremely annoying high-pitched voice, apl.de.ap, a Filipino migrant, and Taboo, who has a voice possible deeper than Biggie Smalls. Their voices are distinctive, but their lyrics are oh so generic. I don’t think it would be exaggerating to say that there isn’t a single clever line on the entire album. That really isn’t good enough.

Anyway, it’s a good album - I really liked it at the time, but it probably hasn’t aged too gracefully.