Boogie Down Productions: Edutainment : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When Boogie Down Productions released its first album, Criminal Minded, in 1987, all of the rap and most of the rock community paused, took a breath and regrouped. Here was a production company/posse creating stellar rhythms and beats, led by DJ Scott LaRock and rapper KRS-One, a twenty-two-year-old who had appointed himself a "teacher" of true cultural history, not the whites-only proposition defined by Western textbooks. BDP was also unbelievably funky.

LaRock, who was shot and killed in the South Bronx in 1987, never appeared on another record. Meanwhile, Edutainment, BDP's fourth album, hints that KRS-One may be finding his job as de facto principal of the School of Humanism a weighty one. Most of the raps on the album are practically a cappella, spoken behind spare beats that tend to leave the lyrics standing stark and exposed rather than complementing and reinforcing them. Not the most artful rapper to begin with, KRS-One jacks up his pit-bull style even further to compensate for the relative weakness of the backing tracks. Here and there, Edutainment dispenses with music altogether, presenting "Exhibit A" through "Exhibit F" – snippets of speeches by Kwame Touré (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and, more or less inevitably, KRS-One himself – between the tunes.

The album's better moments sport a more complex musical structure and a lighter tone in the lyrics. "Love's Gonna Get'cha (Material Love)" tells of a boy who forfeits his B-plus average for the paranoia and horror of big-money drug dealing; his family gains a world of consumer goods but loses its soul. To listeners who cluck disapprovingly, KRS snaps above stuttering drums, "My family's happy; everything is new/Now tell me what the fuck am I supposed to do?"

KRS-One is at his best blending belligerence and irony; on "100 Guns" he lays down confrontational lyrics in a voice ludicrously off-pitch to keep the tone as light as the message is dark. Some of the speechifying is skillful and enlightening enough to make up for the uninteresting beats, as when KRS admonishes blacks for identifying "with their masters" on "Ya Strugglin'" and makes the case that every African American is homeless "even though [he or she] pays rent."

Overall, however, Edutainment is virtually all talk, a fact that belies the promise held out by its title. KRS-One is doing wonders with the words, but the DJ division of BDP badly needs to pump up the jam.