Puff Daddy, Jay-Z, Nelly...King Solomon?
Tufts Senior Sol Masch, otherwise known as King Solomon, would like to think so. A jazz drummer, Masch wanted to create an album that satirized rap culture while still maintaining the genre's musical integrity. His first album, Sezame Street Beatdown, remains true to its goals.
From the moment you pick up the album, you know you're not in for a serious ride through the ghettoes of Harlem or the clubs of Miami. The cover art, drawn by Masch's brother, Ezra, depicts a scene that would send a toddler to therapy for the rest of his or her life: a beefed up Bert and a muscular Ernie giving a bloody Big Bird a pounding in a dark alley. Meanwhile, Don Snufflufagus watches from the shadows, with one eye peeled for witnesses and a thick gold chain dangling from his neck.
"Ice Cream Truck Drive-By" opens the album. True, its rhymes may be a bit juvenile (read: old-school) for the modern era, but the sampled track, with its epic strings, somehow remains true to the gangsta rap genre. "Buttnaked," a fast-paced electronic shuffle, brings to mind Jay-Z's "Can I Get ..." Without listening to the decidedly silly lyrics, it'd be easy to pass the song off as an eligible radio single. Meanwhile, "Gold Chains (And Eightball Jackets)" recalls the feel-good, danceable hip-hop of Naughty By Nature.
Most of the tracks, though, are unapologetically outrageous. "Makin' Love" features Masch on the drums, while brother Ezra, performing as deep-voiced "Carl C. Griffiths," slowly and smoothly muses about the wonders of makin' love. "Smell The Booty" pokes fun at rap's often-abominable sexism, calling to mind the beat of the 69 Boys' early '90s hit "Tootsie Roll." King Solomon muses, "I thought my dog was on the lawn/ but it turned out it was your mamma on the john/ She came downstairs into the hall/ I said damn, girl, why don't you whip out the Lysol?/ No, fool, put on CK-One/ I said, girl, you trippin' 'cause it smells like dung/ You stankin', you funky, you smell like my pet monkey."
Rap-core, the recently popularized fusion of n??-metal guitars and rap lyrics, is another genre that does not escape unscathed. Masch offers us "Rippin' Off Your Testicles," complete with his own drumming and Joe Boyle's repetitive, noisy guitar. Performing as "Unic-Man," he shouts the song's title over and over in an ear-piercingly high voice that elicits immediate laughter, even if the lyrics might disturb males with unusually high levels of castration anxiety: "I'm a lion, a tiger, a bear, oh my/ Don't cry, guy, try to keep your head up high/ 'Cause you definitely don't want to look at your testicles/ They're all severed up in tiny pieces, decimals/ And now it's established that I am indetestable/ So try not to scream when I'm rippin' off your testicles."
King Solomon even satirizes children's music in "And The Cow Goes..." On that track, a guitarist named Sun-Dried Tomato invites a friend to make different animal noises as he sings. But the friend can't keep up, forgets which animals make which noises, and storms off in a barrage of profanities.
Sezame Street Beatdown's most important asset is that Masch never takes himself too seriously. In the CD case insert, he includes one picture of himself _ he stands in a modern kitchen wearing a luxuriant bathrobe, reading Easy Gardening magazine. Meanwhile, he pours himself a Gateway 2000 mug of malt liquor from a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English.
Masch's album is available from mp3.com, and he will bring his live act to the Tufts this April when he performs at Hotung Caf?©.
