Another night in the gym, another new album. Yesterday I picked Mike Ladd and Welcome To The Afterfuture. Never heard of them, or heard anything by them. From what I read he’s a poet who got into rap, so given my ambivalence for the Jay-Z album, I tried to go into this with an open mind.
It was much more poetic that I was expecting, soem tracks were more like a street poet than a rapper. And other tracks did fall into the rap style more, but it was a little bit more melodic than the other albums I have listened to recently. It didn’t have the aggressive edge that you sometimes get with this genre, but at the same time, it wasn’t the melodic funky feel that I got listening to A Tribe Called Quest.
Being more poetic than rap meant that some of the lyrics were surprising, there was a line about Ramadan omelettes in the Himalayas in one of the tracks which felt more like it was reminiscing about the past. And in another there are a load of references to Bladerunner (not surprisingly the track is called Bladerunners).
There were a good couple of tracks at the start which I used for my treadmill warm-up, they had a good pace and meant I could plod along a lot better.
Generally, it was a good album, and I was pleasantly surprised. I must learn not to judge albums based on my experience of other albums that might be in the same genre.
1001 Albums you should hear before you die 