As Wordsworth travels between apartments and floors, he points out drug dealers, prostitutes, child molesters, gamblers, broken families and even the local pirate DVD seller, and he sums it all up with the fact that when the police arrive, invariably nobody saw anything.
“Apartments”, with its beat that flips the sample from Ghostface’s “260”, is an exploration of the building our narrator lives in, and that building exemplifies all the imperfections of poor urban existence. Wordsworth touches the staple Hip Hop bases of ghetto narrative and troublesome love on “Apartments” and “That Way” respectively but, as you might assume, while these tracks pick up on traditional themes, they don’t imitate any examples of those themes that have been used before. So it could have the effect terrorists had on people that buy the American flag” “Copping love from tracks I appeared on in the pastįans gained just like the brand name that appears on the tagĬompanies want me to wear the gear in the ad Built around a hook on which he describes the characteristics of weaker men and asserts that they don’t apply to him, his lyrics dance around notions of Hip Hop, what it is to be a rapper and what it is to be a man, with a number of genius asides thrown in for good measure: Here, it seems, Wordsworth is just letting the flow carry him. It has similar instrumentation to El-P’s beat from Mr.Lif’s “Earthcrusher” with affected string progressions and crescendos and plinking keys, and J-Zone’s drum programming makes the whole thing jump. “Not Me” gets the music going over a J-Zone beat that’s nothing short of incredible. None of Wordsworth’s verses are particularly conceptual, nor are they littered with abstractions or cryptic references, but the captivating way Wordsworth builds pictures or relates stories is testament to an emcee who doesn’t need to complicate his raps to prove his intelligence. And common to all seven of the tracks here is the level of intelligence with which Wordsworth crafts lyrics. Wordsworth glides effortlessly and with style through various important emceeing steps, and has chosen producers and tracks throughout that match not only his flow, but the subject matter he considers. The promo EP I received contains only seven different tracks and a couple of edited versions, yet it could already claim completeness as a Hip Hop album. But Wordsworth clearly hasn’t been sitting on his laurels, or coasting on the respect he’s given: he’s been honing his art.
The fact that a man who made notable contributions to Tribe’s “The Love Movement” and Mos Def/Talib Kweli’s “Black Star” project, as well as appearing on a number of compilations and basically running MTV’s “Lyricist Lounge Show”, has taken this long to release his solo work is a little unusual. In a sense, Wordsworth is the perennial underachiever of independent Hip Hop.