My 125 Favourite ’90s Hip-Hop Albums
#111 Jedi Mind Tricks - The Psycho-Social, Chemical, Biological & Electro-Magnetic Manipulation of Human Consciousness
“As I decay, demons prey above me like a vulture / Ability to endure contradiction is a high sign of culture / Verbal sculptures, self defacing / It is not God or lunacy that I am facing / But the erasing of the purity and passion of my words / The herds of cattle babble on with talk of the absurd / But I preferred to walk away from all the feuds / To find my life is more confusing than a rubik’s cube”
This album has a really long title - that’s the first thing to note, although probably not the most important. Jedi Mind Tricks have developed a reputation (quite deservedly, in case you think I mean otherwise) as a bunch of hypocritical, professed Muslims who have a bizarre lyrical fascination with torture and homosexuals (protesting too much?). This is primarily due to the batshit crazy lead rapper, Vinnie Paz, a fat white guy who has a great flow, and a bad temper. This album, however, is an entirely different beast.
As one may guess from the title, this is full-on, straight-up nerd rap. At this stage, Vinnie Paz was known as Ikon the Verbal Hologram (yeah…). The lyrics are a mixture of pseudo-scientific babble and pseudo-religious babble, the latter particularly derived from the frequent appearances by the Lost Children of Babylon, a notably inferior group of ‘spiritual rappers’, who blabber on about nothing of great value. One of them in particular, Breath of Judah, has a really horrible voice/flow. Ikon’s rapping, on the other hand, is usually pretty good - he has a very good usage of polysyllables.
Of course, like all Jedi Mind releases, what people really care about are the beats, handled as always by Stoupe the Enemy of Mankind. Whilst the production here is no match for the remarkable stuff he’d create for their next album (Violent by Design) - most obviously, the samples used are fairly simple, and in desperate need of bass, the one exception being ‘I Who Have Nothing’, which flips a very familiar sample wonderfully - the basis of his cinematic, RZA-like style is already in place, and generally, it’s pretty good. Nevertheless, ‘Chinese Water Torture’, the third track, should probably be avoided at all costs - the rapping is awful, and the beat consists of little more than a repeated sample of water dripping - I mean, I guess the title is at least accurate.
