Immortal Technique Revolutionary Vol 2 LP
Immortal Technique is a hungry, driven and articulate MC. The power of his lyricism makes him possibly one of the most slept-on MCs in the scene today. Underground he remains and after listening to the album’s sheer vitriol at the music industry, I would think he’s extremely happy with the niche he has carved out for himself and happy with the ability and freedom to make uncompromising records, uncensored by A&Rs. This is a theme he visits regularly on songs such as “The Message and the Money”, hard-hitting “Industrial Revolution” and Pinocchio-sampling “Freedom of Speech.”
Most of all, what shines through on the album, is not the soft, sombre guitars or the passable drum pads or the eloquent scratching in places. They all seem second fiddle to the sheer power of the voice that belongs to the rapper. Gravely and clear, his baritone-diction is excellent. His passion is there, boiling under the surface, being unleashed on angrier tracks such as “Obnoxious” and War on Terrorism-inspired “Cause of Death”. “Obnoxious” works on a double level, flipping between hard, scathing battle rhymes “If you can a dick, then you can take a joke” and battling the system and battling government fallacies “My flow is disgusting, like tap water in Third World Countries.” He blasts everything from the Bush administration to prison rehabilitation to Sony development deals to media outlets to coffee shop revolutionaries. This is an extremely political, socially conscious record and Immortal Technique has a lot to say about the world around him. Distinctly affected by the time he spent behind bars and the plight of political hostage Mumia Abu-Jamal, there is a sense of urgency to his rapping, a sense of trying to get everything he has to say out of his system, before the opportunity is taken away from him. This sense of urgency would serve a lot of the hiphop community well. But with artists like Jay-Z phoning in their “last album” and Nelly happy to be the epitome of pop-hop, there is no commitment to lyricism anymore. This is why Immortal Technique bruises hard with his words. He even gets Mumia Abu-Jamal to, literally, phone in two appearances on the album. He gives an intro and also an eloquent speech about the comparisons between the safety of hiphop culture and the paranoia of homeland security and national security protectionism. Standard track on the album is the light guitar, percussion-led, “Peruvian Cocaine” which gets four rappers to tell a story in different characters about the root of cocaine from harvesting it from plants to the sellers on the block. It’s a moving story, full of greed and desperation and each rapper delivers their verse strongly.
The reason why Immortal Technique has the ability to hit home so hard is because he is obviously a well-read and self-educated man from a poor background. He doesn’t rap down to us and his political lyrics are community-driven. Unlike Dead Prez, who border on preachy and use “White-devil” imagery, he manages to be hardcore but accessible, talking to people as if they were sat on his stoop on Harlem. The words and sentence-structures are not complicated, but written with a view to the average person on the street understanding what he is saying and thus feeling passionate about his rhetoric. Also, you believe he is living what he is saying. You believe, he has been messed around by record companies, been shoved around the prison system like a piece of meat, witnessed the rising death tolls due to HIV. There is a hunger and humility at the heart of it all. Despite Immortal Technique’s confident, rough voice, he does talk with an air of humble consciousness that a lot of political rappers could seek to learn from.
There are some problems with the album though. For all the startling, magical articulate lyricism and hardcore polemic, there are moments when the production is quite passable or even quite disposable. Some of the drum sounds and patterns aren’t distinctive from your average Casio keyboard and some of the strings sound too synthy. There are good moments of acoustic guitar and percussion and the tone of the album is very sombre in places but the album could have stood better to have better production. Despite the fact that Immortal Technique’s voice is so mesmerising, you tend to not notice so much, he is at the end of the day a musician and all musicians need to ensure that the musical half of the song is holding its end up of the bargain and a lot of the songs don’t. I was so impressed by the lyricism that this overshadowed my objective of what the album could have sounded like with better production. Maybe for the next album, Tech should check some of the Hispanic and Latino hiphop groups out there like Ozomatli, 7Notas 7Colores and the wonderful Orishas and think about adding more Latino rhythms to suit his voice and his influences.
All in all, a lyrically superb but production-wise average album. I would recommend this to anyone because Tech has the abilities and skills to be one of the best rappers around. Can’t wait for volume 3.
- Nikesh Shukla
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