For today, you can buy the new collaboration between Boots Riley and Tom Morello, The Street Sweeper Social Club, for four bucks on amazon.com. I'd been looking forward to this collaboration since I heard about it, and now that I'm listening to it, I've discovered that it's pretty much exactly what I should have expected. Boots, the driving half of the Oakland hip hop duo The Coup, is always a treat to hear- I've long held him to be one of the most underrated MCs in rap-but on this outing he's covering well-worn territory. For example, "100 Little Curses" reminds me of "Everythang", the opening track of 2001's
Party Music, but more as a pale shadow. There's nothing wrong with his contribution, except that his lyrics seem less... inspired, more rote than on any of the Coup's albums. More disappointing is Morello's half of the album. It's creeping up on twenty years since the first Rage Against The Machine album, and his unique guitar style, once audacious has grown long in the tooth over four Rage albums and a couple of Audioslave albums (although I'll admit that I only heard the Audioslave songs that made it onto the radio, back in my final days of trying to listen to the radio). More than that, there doesn't seem to be much connection at all between Morello's riffs and Boots' lyrics- it feels like Morello just recorded a bunch of Tom Morello stuff and gave them to Boots to rap over. With Rage, it usually felt like there was a synergy between Zach de la Rocha and Morello that is missing here. The music has a few of Boots' regular hallmarks (the occasional handclaps that I always associate with Boots, for example), but the guitar doesn't suit Boots as well as the more laid back funk of the Coup albums.
All of this sounds more negative than I mean it to, and it is a first impression, being written even as a I listen to the last track on the album. It's not a bad album, or even a mediocre album, not really. It's more just... a predictable album. I keep thinking about another collaboration between a radical black wordsmith and a 90s alternative/metal icon- Saul Williams and Trent Reznor's The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!,which benefitted from the freshness of the collaboration in a way that The Street Sweeper Social Club doesn't. Still, it's 11 new tracks by Boots Riley, and that's always worth at least four bucks.
Mildly Recommended.
