Hopefully you’ve been spending as much time with Erykah Badu’s “The Healer” in your ear as I have and it’s put you in the mood to feel good about Hip-Hop. I know that’s how I feel. Which is why I’m dedicating today’s post to a new Hip-Hop artist who I happen to be feeling especially good about right now.
That artist, St. Louis, Missouri-based Black Spade, is an emcee, singer and beatmaker who produces an amorphously fluid brand of Hip-Hop which embraces Funk, Soul, Jazz, Electronica & psychedelia. His influences are (self-admittedly) varied, drawing on sources that cross both genres and decades, from his father’s record collection, to whatever new music catches his fancy. But his debut OM Records full-length To Serve With Love definitively builds on the sounds of Neo-Soul & Boom-Clap pioneered by the Soulquarians and the Ummah, the sludgy, quantization-free Hip-Hop of J. Dilla & Madlib, and his Future-Soul of contemporaries Sa-Ra & Georgia Anne Muldrow. It’s genre-defying and aesthetic-defining like Erykah’s New Amerykah, and celebrates Hip-Hop, depicts the realities of life & love, and prays for revolution & enlightenment with a similar indomitability.
On-point readers might recall Black Spade from a Blogarhythms post about fellow St. Louis artists Hi-Fidel & DJ Crucial’s The Company of Wolves LP which featured him on the track “Diamonds.” But I was really introduced to him by the homie Tai from Vice Lounge who talked him up on IM and sent me a track called “To Serve With Love,” a donwtempo joint where Spade raps to a chick who “got away” over chugging hi-hats, thumping kicks, clipped snares, snaps and Rhodes licks which sold me on him immediately. I’ve been fiending for more from dude ever since and dug up every scrap I’ve been able to. Luckily others won’t have to resort to such tactics as his full-length is set to drop next week, on Tuesday, March 4th.
While the album might share it’s title with that track, the record’s intro breaks it down a little different, revealing that it’s the Hip-Hop game which he intends to “serve with love,” not some flighty chick. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t dedicate album-space to songs about dames. The record is front-heavy with tracks like “To Serve…,” the jazzy true-love dedication “She’s the One,” “Her Perfume She Wore” a mellow-but-filthy Disco stepper, and “Evil Love” which flips Prince and Flaming Lips references into an electro-slow-jam break-up-song. The LP also boasts joints like “Actioneer,” “Good Crazy,” “Revolutionary Bullshit” and “The Half That’s Never Been Told” that balance raw street-knowledge with a gown-up consciousness & uplfiting messages, and jams like “The Ship Has Sailed,” “Tale of 32,” “Not for the Bullshit,” “Enjoy the Experience” and “As We” that focus on traditional emceeing and his experiences as an up-and-coming Hip-Hop artist.
Black Spade “Enjoy the Experience”
Like another colorfully-monikered emcee, Los Angeles’ Blu, was last year, Black Spade is my “Rap guy to watch” for 2008. He’s the dude I want to see succeed, sell records and make it on to people’s “best of” lists at the end of the year. Coincidentally, he reminds me a lot of Blu when it comes to his style, his skill level & lyrical content, and I hope a lot of the same heads who embraced Below the Heavens will catch on to To Serve With Love.
- El Keter