(100) Days of Soundtrack: #15 – Felt – Felt 2: Tribute to Lisa Bonet
It’s admittedly a bit embarrassing that I’d end up making a musical joke of sorts before approaching a proper hip-hop album in this journey, but it’s not overly surprising in some ways. I don’t really understand hip-hop musically. I get a lot of the cultural aspects, at least as much as someone who has never lived that life can. I appreciate what the genre has done in a wider sense. I can appreciate clever wordplay and the use of the voice as an instrument, when those roads are walked. It’s approaching it musically where things fall apart. It’s like a language where the alphabet has changed: I’ve grown up heavily indoctrinated into music being about movements and chords and riffs and layers and structures. It’s about I-IV-V progressions and the circle of fifths and verse-chorus-verse. Hip-hop is all about the words. It tends to value the boast over introspection, and it often seems to see music as little more than a platform over which to freestyle. There’s a gap there for sure, and while I have certainly found moments in rap which have connected just right for me, I still need a lot of help with translation. The only way to gain fluency is from more exposure, though, so having people out there to help me navigate what I should get exposed to is quite helpful.
Felt 2: A Tribute to Lisa Bonet was the first hip-hop album that crossed my recommendation field for this project, so I was excited to see it. Starting the album, I felt I was in good hands. The intro feeds a line to us: “no matter what style of music you’re into, from punk to funk,” implying that this is an album for everyone. Well there you go. I am definitely the everyone who needs such a promise! Impress me!
Instead of the tasty classic soul backdrop of “Reintroducing,” however, the beats end up falling flat. “Employees of the Year” feels repetitive, with four beats repeated over and over throughout. “Your Mans and Them” effectively doubles the length of the loop. It’s something that has made rap less accessible for me… often the beat is all about the loop, the single hook repeated over and over again. It’s not that this is never found in other music, but other genres have more layers to work with: a repetitive, single riff song can find itself with flourishes and irregularities from being performed live instead of looped. Often one loop creates a backdrop for the rest of a song’s chord changes. If all else fails, there’s the melody helping break things up. Here, the loop feels barely touched. It’s not that the beats aren’t interesting or appealing. If these are samples, Felt have some gourmet taste, while if they’re newly minted, at least each riff is intelligently crafted. “Dirty Girl” has a killer riff to it, weird and quirky but also catchy, but its uniqueness also makes it all the more obvious when it repeats over and over, those chipmunk flourishes bouncing up from the EQ in the same places ad infinitum. Things do improve as the album goes on, though: “Morris Day” feels better because the layers of sound come in and out and create movement, even though there’s no less repetition of the primary beat. Adding and subtracting more layers, having an actual “transitional” moment at the end of some measures, these all create a bit of extra structure. “Early Mornin’ Tony” is immediately attractive for its breakdowns, chopping things up, and “Gangster Ass Anthony” serves up a second helping of the same, a companion piece not only in title but in style. The latter is particularly chaotic, which works super well for a genre that thrives on fast paced, steady-stream lyricism… eschewing a normal structure and shaking things up as often as possible helps break up the rhymes where a verse/chorus structure doesn’t otherwise exist.
If the beats don’t hold me like I’d want, I do still appreciate some of the themes here: going back to “Dirty Girl,” I appreciate that the lyrics are praising women who work, well, dirty jobs… women who aren’t always pristine and primped. “I Shot a Warhol” is full of beautifully gritty images of art and rage mixing. “The Biggest Lie” is particularly thoughtful, challenging the status quo, fighting the fact that everything out there seems to be problematic. It’s a big picture cynicism thing, and that speaks to what hip-hop does best. It’s not to say there isn’t tired braggadocio as well, from the chauvinist dickwaving of “Breaker Down Like a Shotgun” to the tough-guy in the club posturing of “Your Mans and Them,” though even in here there are moments of cleverness that are unexpected… there’s something that remains charming about “Woman Tonight,” with it’s description of “looking at your face like I’ll be tested on it later” and “bring[ing] along your ethics and your issues and your taboos” and its almost naive desperation for human contact playing against the more conventional hookup narrative. The over-macho pratfalls are here throughout, but they’re tempered by other elements.
Maybe, then, there really is a little something for everyone on Felt 2. It’s fair to ask if there’s enough to sustain someone who isn’t already into hip-hop, but if music makes you think a bit deeper about what you’re hearing, its job is already halfway done.
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