Blogarhythms

Every day musicians I could give two shits about put out new albums. Their music gets played on the radio. Their videos get played on television, or watched on YouTube, or wherever the fuck people actually watch videos these days. Their face appear on the covers and in the pages of magazines. Bloggers mess themselves over them. And they even get invited on national television programs to perform their songs live for audiences made up of millions of potential fans.

It’s with nearly the same frequency that a certain rapper I love puts out new albums. He’s released at least three so far this year alone! That prolific emcee’s name is Dave Cohn, though he prefers the alias Serengeti, and he hails from the city of Chicago, Illinois. His Chi-town-themed concept album Dennehy and his electronic emopus Don’t Give Up, a collaboration with producer Polyphonic, were two of my favorite albums last year. In 2008 he released an updated and improved Dennehy and joined forces with Chicago beatmaker Tony Trimm and New Zealand-born vocalist Renee-Louise Carafice as Yoome for another outstanding robo-rap outing. That would be more than enough for the average musician, but not the ‘Geti King! Which is why I hold in my hand a freshly-pressed self-titled CD from Friday Night, another group-project, this time with Chicago-bred, Los Angeles-based emcee and visual artist Hi-Fidel a.k.a. Frohawk Two Feathers.

Anyone who’s followed Serengeti’s career to-date should well know that he’s a master of conceptual songwriting and album-making who’s capable of creating fully fleshed out characters and inhabiting them wholly through scenarios both profound and frivolous. Since his 2002 debut Dirty Flamingo he’s presented himself in a sort of uncomfortably reflective, self-deprecating, emotionally honest way, even when he was spitting braggadocio, spinning humorous yarns and bugging out. Of late the in your face boasts, goofiness and abstraction have taken a backseat to soul-baringly emotive journal recitations and scarred recountings of his personal travails. But on Friday Night ‘Geti and Fidel, with help from Los Angeles-based production duo Breakfast (formerly Art Thugs), approach having fun and acting a fool with the same level seriousness, artistry, authenticity and attention to detail that he’s addressed matters of the heart and existential pathos with on his last couple of records.

Like Dennehy before it Friday Night is a concept album. Over the course of 15 tracks and just over an hour it follows “heroes” Dave and Umar, two workplace acquaintances happenstance pulls into a madcap series of misadventures involving booze, drugs, “girls,” clubbing and tragedy. It works sorta like of one of those sophomoric road movies starring Cory Haim and Cory Feldman, or Harold and Kumar if they were into coke instead of weed, is tighter in execution (thanks to linear storytelling and cinematic skits that string it together) than Dennehy, and is one of the most epic Hip-Hop concept LPs since The Streets‘ A Grand Don’t Come for Free, Prince Paul’s Prince Among Thieves or Organized Konfusion’s Equinox. It also benefits from the evenhanded production of the Breakfast Beats crew, who lace the duo’s lascivious lyricism with synth-and-808-heavy beats that appropriately range from “clubby” to “get crunk.”

Friday Night “Again and Again”

As might be expected from the pairing of ‘Geti and Fidel, surreal celluloid-style storytelling comprised of abstract imagery, complimented by eccentric vocabulary and culminating in unpredictable twists is the order of the day. “Girl” for example is the most cinematic drug deal gone wrong song I’ve heard since Ghostface Killah’s “Shakey Dog” thanks in equal measure to some of the most whimsical lyricism this side of Ghostface or MF Doom and a sizzurpy space-age Trap-Hop track that would suit the Lil Waynes of the world perfectly. Speaking of Weezy, “Boy,” voiced entirely in that devilish slowed-down chopped-n-screwed pitch-shift effect, is one of the most effective cuts since his “I Feel Like Dying” (or Mike Skinner’s “Blinded by the Lights”) at conveying the less-than-desirable feelings associated with recreational drug-use. I can’t even discuss many of the most compelling tracks for fear of blowing some of the surprises in the album’s storyline.

I can’t neglect to mention a couple more of my favorite tunes though…Higher velocity tracks, like “She Luh That” and “Let’s Go!,” which both tread into 808-and-cowbell-fueled booty-clap and body-rock Electro/Bass territory, are standouts based solely on production alone…Mellow-meets-melancholy numbers like “Crashing Down,” “The Gold Coast” (one of two selections featuring guest crooning from Hi-Fidel’s Missouri-based homie and Blogarhythms favorite Black Spade) and “Re-Arrange the Light,” which mix slumpy Electrofunk/slow-jam drum-machine beats with chilly IDM-ish electronics sound the most like something that could’ve been on one of Serengeti’s recent joints such as Don’t Give Up or The Boredom of Me…And Los Angeles area “Hipster”-Hop clique 87 Stick-Up Kids* add some of their Throwback-Rap/club kid flavor to the only vaguely Creedence Clearwater Revival-inspired beatbox freestyle cum club banger “Down On the Corner.”

If an album by a Chicago area Hip-Hop artist could’ve carried the appelation Invincible Summer (the now abandoned title of Common’s forthcoming LP) and lived up to it Hi-Fidel and Serengeti’s Friday Night is it! Granted, Friday Night is just as perfect a title, but with its debauched story-raps and futuristic beats that embrace, envelope, devour, digest and absorb the sounds of the “dirty” South, the West Coast, old-school Rap & Electro, electronica and the shit popping in the “Hipster”-Rap & Club-Rap scenes it would’ve killed that warm-weather-wildin’-out vibe. I know it’s not exactly warm right now, but the shit still works…Like a glamorous companion to Dennehy, a David Lynchian (or Cohen Brothers-esque) cousin to Kail’s True Hollywood Squares, or a whole album by the dude behind N*E*R*D’s “Everyone Nose” if he was a dick who gave girls drugs instead of a nice dude who helped them come down.

Cop one of these bad boys on the Friday Night website right the eff now!

*Bonus — Download the 87 Stick-Up Kids’ debut single, a Bmore-influenced jam called “Stoops and Basements” right the eff here if you wanna check ‘em out, or you just want a bit of free music.