7 Heads R Better Than 1: No Edge-Ups in South Africa

After almost three decades, hip-hop should be tired of the thug clichés, the gun metaphors, the useless misogyny — but Mos Def once said that the music is where the people are. Now that the people are divided between sensitive thugs and revolutionaries, between “keeping it real” and staying fed, hip-hop seems to have hit a wall. After a barrage of reality-based television shows over the past year (and it looks like there are more on the way), shell shock from “real-time” images from Iraq and burned out on serious news, this generation still has no idea how to get comfortable with music as a mirror. We need an escape, a comfortable fantasy — and where better to find that than through pimps, gangsters, and hustlers?

No Edge Ups in South Africa, offered by 7 Heads, is a better looking glass: it offers an eclectic mix of voices, genuine microphone slayers, and thought-provoking skits over good music. More importantly, it is a refreshing break from pseudo-reality. As something of a less sporadic amalgamation of talent than Wu-Tang, 7 Heads Entertainment includes a group of homeboys from Brooklyn who provoke thought without posing, posturing, or playing themselves. Ten years ago, they would’ve been considered fresh. Now, unfortunately, they might sound like throwbacks to the BET/MTV/VH-1/Clear Channel exposed hip-hop heads.

But this compilation succeeds because it feels like entering the late ’80s. The Brooklyn-based crew of several MCs, 7 Heads, is above average. D.C.-based Asheru starts out with “BMIG” (“I make the song, the song don’t make me”), a song that not only bangs harder than fists on a lunch table at school — it actually has some substance. That’s the running theme of the 7 Heads crew, even if they don’t always set themselves apart with beats or rhymes. Another Asheru song featuring Talib Kweli, “Mood Swings” is another standout — a beautiful blend of R&B/soul with jazz chords as the backdrop. Kweli, who can be notorious for a sometimes uneven flow, shines here.

7 Heads is good for spinning old ideas on their heads and making them righteous. The concept of rappers singing hooks, which has received some rabid criticism from “pure hip-hop heads” doesn’t apply here. “Queen City” remix, featuring BJ, Piakhan, and Akil is a melodic meditation on young women who fall victim to the rough street economy of the hood. The voices singing the chorus are melancholy and effective, not aspiring to be melodic, per se, just haunting and it works. The same is true for Djinji Brown’s “Mr. Dynamite”, a trance-like track that pays homage to James Brown using samples from his work with a punchy patchwork of visionary production. RLD and Richy Pitch have a behind closed doors type discussion over a smooth instrumental on “Reflections on a Heart Attack”, which is not particularly illuminating but an interesting assessment/rant on the ineffectiveness of Black Entertainment Television: “That shit really is the man-tan millennial minstrel show,” a voice says. And there’s a lot of that minstrel stuff going around.

Whether you agree or not, the glory of this compilation is that it airs a collective, sincere and inspirational array of thought — without relying on old pimp or gangster clichés or even alluding to them. Anyone searching outside of radio airwaves and music videos for the truth about staying real, particularly in the realm of the ever-changing world of hip-hop, will find enough to ground them in these 14 tracks.