Dead Prez: Let's Get Free : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Radical rappers Stic.Man and M-1 of Dead Prez proclaim themselves to be "somewhere in between N.W.A and PE." But that comparison is a bit limiting: Their rhymes are more fluid than Public Enemy's, they're more informed than Ice Cube was during his black-power stage, and their song "Assassination" goes further than N.W.A's "Fuck tha Police." "I swear on the president's grave, I'm sick of living in this bullshit," they promise. "We down to take it to the full length/ Meet us up on Capitol Hill and we can get up on some real shit." Don't expect to see these guys doing any Rap the Vote public-service announcements anytime soon.

Let's Get Free is a statement of sedition wrapped in a synergistic blend of urgent noise, angry rhythm and rhymes that display black skill in the hour of chaos. Instead of inserting the senseless skits that dominate most hip-hop records, Dead Prez deliver rabble-rousing oratories in between songs. Largely produced by DP themselves, Let's Get Free varies from early RZA soulsonics to Southern down-bottomed bounce. Adrenaline-boosting songs like "I'm an African" and "Hip-hop" are unadulterated semiautomatic funk; "psychology" and "animal in man" tug at the heartstrings like militant blues songs. Numbers like "Police State," "Behind Enemy Lines," "'They' Schools" and "We Want Freedom" equate classrooms with jail cells, the projects with killing fields and everything from water to television with conduits for brainwashing by the system.

The duo falters when it gets into dealings with the opposite sex. The well-intentioned "Mind Sex" comes off as hokey, with lines like, "How 'bout we start with a salad?/A fresh bed of lettuce with croutons/Later we can play a game of chess on the futon." But Dead Prez show a light touch on "Happiness," a breezy summer-in-the-city ditty. They may be anomalous in modern-day hip-hop, but they're like everybody else in one sense: A Mary J. Blige sample means that even Puff Daddy gets publishing points on the record. Dead Prez may have a blueprint for revolution, but they still can't stop Puffy. (RS 840)

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