pedestrian

cover: ABR44

Vol.1 - unIndian Songs CD/LP (Anticon.)

The unique qualities of pedestrian's Volume One: unIndian songs may well be apparent from the album's opening moments, in which pedestrian (performing under his real name and assumed title, Evangelist J.B. Best) roars out the introduction to a secular sermon ("Sermon on the Subject of Death") before a church organ blends into the song-collage "O Hosanna," which features a Run DMCish back-and-forth with jel, an extended Nas quotation, cut in lines from Ice-T, Gift of Gab, Flava Flav, and Elder I.D. Beck, a dubby song-within a song called "people pass," a five-line epitaph sung by why?, and finally a closing verse that critiques prayer and affirms song as something like a humanist prayer, praiseless yet positively engaged. What's immediately obvious in this first dense thicket of words and beats remains true throughout the album: 1. pedestrian's studied desire to synthesize very different forms-spoken, preached, sung, rhymed and unrhymed, 2. his classicist sense of language (of "death's black train" he bellows, "Its engine whistles in the register of the clouds the steam of your name"), and 3. the warm spirit of collaboration among friends and artistic equals.

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. With this kind of aggressive appropriation (or "thoughtful theft" as pedestrian recently referred to it in an interview aired on MTV Europe), he seems to be posing the question: are the song forms that have fallen into disuse and inattention poisoned by the dust that coats them? Or are they still viable, still worth taking up as one's own?

It is the special collaborative quality that lends lightness to the album. That not a song goes by without a couple voices from a revolving cast of characters chiming in-whether dose's refrains on "O Silent Bed," sole's frequent interjections, why?'s harmonizing presence, or the provocatively-titled posse cut penned entirely by pedestrian, "anticon."-imbues the music with a simple friendliness it would otherwise lack. This quality certainly has something to do with why once anticon colleague and present Ninja Tune artist, Sixtoo, has cannily summed up unIndian songs as "the definitive anticon album" despite the obvious fact that it takes a dramatic turn away from the kind of music usually associated with anticon.