pedestrian
The album's title itself-unIndian songs-is probably the first clue (along with the rotted paper and worn edge look of the album's delicate artwork) that history looms large in pedestrian's vision, both aesthetically and thematically. pedestrian commits a large-scale excavation of hip-history on his album, rethinking and reckoning with the length of hip-hop's last thirty years through samples, direct quotes, and stylistic references. The ghosts of De La Soul's Posdanus, Rakim, Freestyle Fellowship, Intelligent Hoodlum, and T La Rock, among others, are invoked, and even old school party chants are accomplished, though with small mammals-a housecat on "blind dates" and a few flocks worth of stirring birds on "anticon."-in place of crowds. Rather than projecting a single inimitable voice-the very goal of the hip-hop MC-pedestrian seems to be entranced by the beautiful variety of accents in cultures across time and space and adds to the above shortlist borrowings from and nods to Dylan Thomas, Lorca, Reverend J.M. Gates and the southern "shouter" tradition of preaching, pre-WWII American folk music (check out "The History Channel?" in particular), not to mention his secular use of Biblical and gospel imagery.