Beauty and the Beat

Edan: Beauty and the Beat

Beauty and the Beat
2005Alt Hip-Hop

Trippy, layered and hypnotic, somehow Edan has found ways to continue to sample crap from all over the place. While his contemporaries are pounding out looped two-key Casio drek, he has done the throwback, scratchy record thing, bringing back echoes of Paul’s Boutique and other fun crackly hip-hop of a bygone era. Granted, his white-boy bravado isn’t the subtlest thing in the world, and he ends up sounding like a lot of other white hip-hop guys delivery-wise and content-wise. We get it that you listened to a lot of Afrika Bambaataa and Biz Markie and whatnot; you don’t have to prove to us that you grew up listening to black music. Of course his street cred probably isn’t terribly high, being a graduate of Berklee College of Music. Clearly the guy knows a lot about music and music’s history, which is what makes this album incredibly musically interesting, and hopefully a great jumping off point to a long career–although maybe a career that would be better served letting others with more interesting voices take the front seat.