D CDs #470: And Could He Give Us More?

I know what you're thinking. Finally an ill-informed white boy dares to discuss a hip-hop revolution.

Wikipedia tells me LL Cool J's Radio represents the vanguard of the shift in dominance from old school hip-hop to new school, a fact I relate both to introduce what I want to talk about, and by way of warning the reader I know so little about hip-hop that I'm reduced to reading Wikipedia.

With my ignorance fully admitted, then, the thesis statement: Radio was the sound of the future. 

Even in so banal a position, I run into problems. Yes, it was astonishing, having listened to this, to learn it was released as early as 1985. But what does that actually mean? What I want to be true is that this represents how forward-thinking Radio is, that it encapsulated the sound of the early nineties almost a decade ahead of time. What I fear is true is that all I've picked up on is time-lag; the inevitable dissemination delay between block parties in Brooklyn, and the mix tapes of suburban North East England. 

When we get down to brass tacks and golden tracks, though, that's just noodling on how much Cool J (along with DJ Cut Creator and Rick Rubin) had one eye on the future, while the other focussed on the charts and communiques he used to conquer hip-hop. What matters is the victory.

There's perhaps some irony in the fact Cool J became the genre's emperor through democratising music. By showing you anyone could do it, he ensured everyone would do it, and some of them better than he did (I'll toss out here an entirely unsourced and uninformed opinion that this is why Charlie Juliet never hit so hard with an LP again). Radio is so minimalist it feels weird describing it with so long a word as "minimalist". It's just a dude with a microphone, a drum machine, and the occasional sample, clipped so short and tight they land like lightning strikes amid the storm of percussion. The pressure is fully on Cool J to be enough almost on his own, which he embraces in a statement of intent far more powerful then any number of balls-out braggadocio broadside ever could. Maybe that's why he gets the inevitable boast-track out of the way immediately, so he can move on to better things.

And those better things are genuinely great. It's absolutely the case that you just need to hand this guy a microphone and a tight beat and he can bring it. It's really hard to make something look this easy. Especially when you also make it funny. "You Can't Dance" (dips into ableist language aside) and "That's A Lie" in particular are notable for brilliantly tearing chunks out their targets, and doing so without ever reaching for a word you couldn't say in a Saturday morning cartoon. "Dear Yvette" is almost as fun, the admittedly uncomfortable sexual politics of its slut-shaming slightly sweetened by Cool J's own tales of heterosexual entanglement being oddly sweet in their hopeless romanticism.

If there's a problem here, it's in the timing. Assembling a meal with the smallest number of ingredients doesn't just force you to get everything you're adding absolutely right, it means no matter how well you prepare the food, people won't want to each all that much of it. Just about every track here starts brilliantly, and just about every track ends a verse after you want it to.  Sure, it's genuinely amazing that this formula works so repeatedly ten times in a row (we'll ignore "El Shabaz" here, for all that making a mid-disc palette cleanser the filthiest dish on offer is pretty fun). But I don't care how sick your rhymes are, sooner or later I'm going to stop caring how much you hate a guy whose dancing you dislike.

But then what am I recommending instead? Messing with an almost perfect formula? Adding more tracks for which, if they existed at all, there was presumably a good reason why they got left off originally? About the only advice I could offer, which stopped being timely forty years ago and never started being useful, was that these are two of the best EPs ever written, which maybe didn't need combining into a format where their genius is slightly blunted.

Still, even if I'm right (and ifs don't get much bigger), that wouldn't necessarily translate into Radio scoring a bigger win. And really, how much more total did its triumph need to be?

Eight tentacles.