Thursday, December 12, 9 p.m.
Gabe's, 330 East Washington Street, Iowa City IA
The Sacramento-based legends of Blackalicious bring their brand of brainy, alternative hip-hop to the stage at Gabe’s in Iowa City on December 12.
The first thing you learn about Blackalicious when you discover its music is that the MC of the duo, who goes by the moniker Gift of Gab, really does have a gift for gab. The rapper is known for his improbably tongue-twisting speed raps that typically incorporate all manner of creative poetic strategies and interesting thematic conceits. The most famous of these is probably the alliterative assault of “Alphabet Aerobics,” a track in which Gab fills each bar with words that start with one letter of the alphabet as he works his way from A to Z. “Perfected poem, powerful punchlines / Pummeling petty powder puffs in my prime” gives way to “Quite quaint quotes keep quiet it's Quannum [note: this is the name of the duo’s label] / Quarrelers ain't got a quarter of what we got-uh.” In lesser hands, this could be an extremely cheesy move to pull, like a homework assignment from high school English. But Gab has the moxie, attitude, and extreme raw skills to pull it off. One of the wildest elements of this track has nothing to do with the words at all – It’s the tempo. The beat by Cut Chemist is accelerating through the entire runtime as the punchy drum-and-piano groove almost imperceptibly speeds up to a final BPM at least 50-percent faster than the beginning.
The fact that Gift of Gab is capable of staying perfectly on beat while he speeds his way through his insanely complex lyrics is one source of wonder, but the seamlessness of the whole thing really confounds. It’s not like the track moves from a section at one tempo into a clear transition to another tempo. No, the pace is increasing moment by moment, even within the span of one measure. This means that Gab has to fine-tune the rhythm of his bars at literally every moment of the performance and ramp up the speed at the rate of like one percent per bar. It’s enough to make you scratch your head in dumbfounded amazement. (Note: Through a quick Google search, you can find a video of Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe rapping his way through this song on live TV, actually quite accurately.)
Anyway, that’s one track in the Blackalicious catalog. Don’t even get me started on “Chemical Calisthenics” – that’s a whole 'nother can of worms. The truth is, however much tracks such as “Alphabet Aerobics” get the lion’s share of the attention from casual listeners, Blackalicious has always offered way more than warp-speed stunt raps. Classic albums such as 1999’s Nia and 2002’s Black Arrow carry entire discrete universes within their running times. The production, handled mainly by the other half of the duo, Chief Xcel, encompasses an untold spread of genres from blistering breakbeats and boom-bap rhythms to woozy, beautiful soul music to collages of samples arranged into kinetic beat spreads.
The same can be said of the duo’s most recent album, 2015’s Imani Vol. 1, which loses none of the musicians' hard-hitting energy and omnivorous production. Early album highlight “Blacka” finds Gab tearing the hell out of an Xcel beat built around one chunky guitar riff that gets chopped and re-planted alongside the thumping drums. “Escape” slides through a haze of overlaid, melancholy piano lines and smeared string arrangements as Gab details the crumbling life of a drug addict who’s falling out of his family and society. The shorter track “I Like The Way You Talk” is the closest thing we get to the stunt raps of “Alphabet Aerobics” here, as Gab’s tight internal rhyme schemes and constantly tumbling cadences pour out of him with stunning precision, all over a massive beat built over a distorted bass guitar riff and clanging cymbal rushes. The only thing consistent about the sound of Blackalicious is a kaleidoscopically all-encompassing approach to songwriting, with no solid ground to stand on. The duo funnel fragments of any number of genres into their combinatory tracks, and frost all of that with the effortless microphone madness of Gift of Gab, to the point that it’s often a glorious shock to the system to step into.
Blackalicious plays its Iowa City concert at 9 p.m. on December 12, admission is $20, and more information and tickets are available by visiting ICGabes.com.
