Edan

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Suddenly, it's 1994 again. Two of our current spring anthems on urban radio are almost exact retreads of huge hits from eight years back. The Notorious B.I.G.'s radio hit, "One More Chance" has come back in the form of Ashanti's "Foolish" which uses the same, prominently Debarge, sample. Meanwhile, the track for Jennifer Lopez' new "Ain't It Funny" (featuting Ja Rule and Cadillac Tie) is practically a note-for-note resurrection of Craig Mack's unexpected smash "Flava In Ya Ear". Given sampling's insatiable hunger, we've gotten to the point where hip-hop will eat itself -- again and again and again.

It's only through this logic of return, repetition and re-creation that we can appreciate the unusual example of Edan -- a young, white, 20-something rapper/producer/DJ out of Baltimore, now living in Boston. Debuting his first album, Primitive Plus (Solid Records), Edan devotes himself to the hip-hop aesthetics of the late 1980s with obsessive detail. Almost every song, every lyric is a nod to a bevy of giants -- some remembered, some forgotten -- from hip-hop's old school and early new school (think 1985-1989) including Rakim, Percee P, Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, Marley Marl, Ced Gee, Kool Keith, Stezo, etc.

Let's not confuse things here -- many rappers pay tribute to the past all the time in both figurative and literal fashion -- but Edan takes it to levels heretofore unseen. Not only does he, like Ashanti and Lopez, sonically recreate the past -- "One Man Arsenal" for example, uses the same drum track from Boston's obscure '80s rap group TDS Mob -- but on two songs in particular, "Ultra 88" and "Schooly D", he pays tribute to the Ultramagnetic MCs and Schooly D by mimicking their vocal form and flow. This is clearly someone who's grown up under hip-hop's 20+ year tutelage and Edan is just the most obvious example of a new generation of emerging MCs who spent their childhood with rap records as parent, teacher, playmate and progeny alike.

As the album's primary producer, Edan excels with the dirty, rough sound of yesteryear, unleashing sparse, over-modulated drum tracks ("Rapperfication"), slick, grooving loops ("Run That Shit"), thrashing guitar tears ("You $uck"), and "mega dumb reverb" laden vocals ("Number One Hit Record"), giving Primitive Plus the quality of a demo tape lost since 1987, forgotten in someone's shoe box. He's especially good in resurrecting the art of "fast rap": i.e. hip-hop beats that manage to pump above 110 BPM (beats per minute), a rarity in a time when the average rap song is about 15% slower than it was 10 years ago.

In some ways, Edan can seem a little too "authentic", like he's little more than a one man, old school revue show. But what saves him from being a living wax museum of '88 hip-hop style is his knowing sense of humor. For example, his lyrics are more style than substance, but are giddily fun to listen to just because of that. On "Syllable Practice" for example, Edan's even considerate enough to warn you: "I'm not going to say anything significant, but, it's going to be battle rhymes, and it's going to sound pretty" and then, true to promise, he hits you with this: "the renegade radical/demonstrates battle drill/efficiency and dedication/through placement/of syllable swords/directly where umbilical cords/were chopped/on little kids/put up for adoption".

Edan is a hip-hop prodigal son who simultaneously goofs on the music's conventions and pays homage to them. It's tempting to write off Edan as another "back to the old school" preservationist, however, songs like "Emcees Smoke Crack" and "Syllable Practice" bristle with layers of irony that could only come from a post-90s MC, literate in hip-hop's fundamentals. Unlike Ashanti and Lopez -- whose liberal borrowing from the past is superficial at best -- Edan manages to make something new out of something old in ways that are unexpected and entertaining. The result is one of the most creative underground albums in ages that manages to both validate hip-hop's past glory and reassure us of its future potential.

P.S. Be sure to also pick up Edan the DJ's Fast Rap mix-CD. Edan picks from his own rarefied collection for a mix of songs that feature some of the best scintillatingly rapid flows from the past such as Percee P's spectacular "Lung Collapsing Lyrics", Big Daddy Kane's mind-melting "Warm It Up Kane", Organized Konfusion's rattling "Prisioners of War", and over a dozen other selectables. Alas, Edan's mixing skills are rather sparse -- he rarely mixes, instead just quickly segueing from one track to the other, but the selection alone is worth the price of admission; especially given that most of us haven't heard any of these songs in at least a decade -- if we ever heard them at all.