The Preface

We Say...

Review by Jayson Greene

The first sound you hear on Elzhi's The Preface is a sample of a preacher's voice lamenting, "I don't know what this world is coming to!" followed by Elzhi (government name: Jason Powers) grumbling to his friends about the "bullshit on the radio" over an artfully faded, tape loop-soul beat courtesy of Detroit producer Black Milk that summons the ghost of Jay Dee. In other words, short of watermarking the album with a voice intoning "this is an indie-rap album" at odd intervals, there isn't much more Elzhi could do to clarify his intentions. The moral and creative bankruptcy of "current" hip-hop and the world's pervasive wickedness, after all, are independent hip-hop's two most shopworn laments, and at this point they tend to produce more eye rolls than head nods.

Luckily, Elzhi at least has the credentials to back up his griping: he was a member of Slum Village, the late-'90s Detroit trio that once counted the mighty J Dilla in its ranks. On The Preface, Elzhi has recruited Black Milk to serve as his surrogate Dilla, in much the same way Ghostface gathered together enough Wu disciples to recreate a semblance of the Abbott's sound on last year's The Big Doe Rehab. Black Milk's beats have the same slightly surreal, half-remembered quality as Dilla's: the soulful voices he samples often dip and wobble uncertainly in pitch, eloquently suggesting the warp and weft of vinyl as well as the distortions of memory.

As a rapper, Elzhi doesn't so much "ride" these quietly gorgeous productions as smother them, filling up every inch of available space with neatly turned internal rhyme, tricks of meter, and, above all, extravagant wordplay. He has passion to burn, but Elzhi is mostly a man in love with his own pen, and he spends most of The Preface showing off all the nifty different ways he can flourish it. Listen, on "Guessing Game," to how caught up he gets just laying out the song's concept: "Yo, I'mma take a double, take a double syllable/ And split it down the middle so it's no longer even/ The first half stay, the last half leavin'/ So now the end of the line sound deceiving/ So try to figure out the word to match before it change the meaning." He then goes onto to demonstrate, running effortlessly through a routine that, with different source material, could almost pass for an old vaudeville bit: "Check — this girl was peckin my neck/ She knew this one-minute man who used to bust in one sec--/retary"; "Now we can really begin/ Long as these beats keep these treats fallin out of my pen--/ñata"; "Lost for words, that's why she hop up all on my dick--/tionary" (this last one makes it clear that nothing really gets Elzhi off except vocab).

There's more where this comes from. "Color" follows nearly the exact same structure as "Guessing Game": Elzhi gives us the premise ("Ok kids, today we learn the color scheme") and then elaborates on it to the point of giddiness, or exhaustion: "Got them boys in blue with blackjacks, lockin the new youth/ They sell purple through Blackberries with the Bluetooth/ I saw this gold-digger redbone I knew posin in Black Tail..." you get the picture. Even when he's spitting pure swagger, it still feels like it should come with footnotes: "I end careers, years, peers, ears, fears with spears/ They say I'm gifted/ You lifted like the beers in Cheers." There are emotional songs here too, about women, relationships and whatnot, but they feel slightly perfunctory; Elzhi doesn't open up to humans nearly as eloquently as he does to his notebook, and this album is best taken as a supremely satisfying near-wallow in the pure pyrotechnics of a dazzlingly gifted MC.