Scholarly

(as with all music related posts, you can see the full text of this article and my rant on Pop music at Evolving Music)

You deserve the underground of Seattle. Yes. I said Seattle. The City of Rain isn't just for Starbucks (scary stuff people) addicts, Seahawk fans, or long-haired flannel wearing musicians with the urge to turn their brains into a Jackson Pollack painting anymore. The indie (not grunge, indie) scene is pulsing with new musicians interested in turning the surroundings into a musical tapestry of depression AND hope. I thought a band like Throw Me the Statue showcased Seattle music at its best. Hip-Hop? You can find that in the Bay Area, LA, various havens on the East Coast. But not Seattle, not since Sir Mix-A-Lot or outside of the Lifesavas anyway. Or so I thought. Always exposed to new things through the IndieFeed Hip-Hop collective, I was recently turned onto Blue Scholars, an underground twosome from the Northwest with two albums for you to sink your ears into.

As with most prolific and worthwhile underground artists, the personal stories of the artists play an enormous role in the music they make, and the Blue Scholars, a play on blue collar, let their history and surroundings saturate every beat and line of their two cds, the 2004 release Blue Scholars and this year's Bayani. They're the answer to that question you have long contemplated but maybe never thought to ask...What do you get when you mix a Filipino rapper and an "Iranian American jazz-trained pianist" turned DJ? The result is a large spectrum of beats ranging from melancholy drifters to jazzy car cruisers, and lyrics examining the social, economic, and political systems in existence here in the United States. But when not tackling the socioeconomic divide, they still have the time and the skill to put together laid back summer day tracks that you can imagine coming out of stereos in the streets or from passing car windows.

What's interesting in discovering these two albums at the same time, produced three years apart, is noting some of the similarities while also being able to see how far the group has come in their personal and musical mission. On Blue Scholars, the group sounds like your fundamental backpack crew. The lyrics are laid back, slightly unpolished, but still with a sense of urgency in the message. The beats are of a lower production value, giving it the basement studio sound, but still contain musical hooks and phrases that you can't stop listening to. In short, it's your typical stellar yet underfunded debut album from an underground hip-hop group. The subject matter tackles their origins as a group, their personal connections to the working class and life for a Seattle transplant.

Bayani, on the other hand, shows what three years can do to the growth and development of a musical sound. They come out sounding more secure, more focused and more intent on being heard. If Blue Scholars is a whisper from the basement, Bayani is a shout from the rooftops. Some of the more typical hip-hop beats of the first album are abandoned here for more complicated beats incorporating jazz and world sounds. The beats by Sabzi here are of a much higher quality, creating a more perfect tapestry for Geographic's tightened and more lyrically calculated flow. You see glimpses of what he's capable of as a lyricist on the first album, but the second album shows off just how talented he is in mixing potent wordplay, social observations and governmental condemnations into complicated phrases that roll off his tongue.

Bayani also refuses to let its political message be ignored. While Blue Scholars carries some references to the war and bits and pieces speaking against our current government (which really hasn't changed much since the album's release), Bayani is infused with an anti-war, anti-establishment message that makes some sort of appearance in every song, most notably "Back Home" which tackles the need to bring American troops back from Iraq and "50 Thousand Strong" which looks at the riots and subsequent police action at the WTO meetings in 1999. At the same time, they don't forget the need for tracks that you can sit back to, which they fill with "Ordinary Guys" and the homage song to their hometown, "North By Northwest."

So if you're looking for some solid underground hip-hop from an unusual geographic location, look no further. It's only fitting that an MC named Geographic could help make the traditional locations of genres irrelevant.