Rotation

Mike Ladd
Easy Listening for Armageddon
Scratchie/Mercury

Since the term was coined, "trip-hop" has been associated with the moody, noirish sound collages, rap singing and slow-churning electro-beats of folks such as Tricky and Massive Attack -- music that's hip-hop identified, but stylistically miles away from current rap flavors. With his debut CD, Easy Listening for Armageddon, 26-year-old poet Mike Ladd (who emerged from the Nuyorican spoken word scene) offers a different take on trip-hop. Ladd's divergence from convention is driven first and foremost by his lyrics. While Easy Listening is full of trip-hop's musical signposts, the tracks are always spare and elastic enough to accommodate what's really trippy: Ladd's freeform, stream-of-consciousness, over-the-top and deep-down-inside verse.

Like most classic rappers, Ladd steeps his monologues in Afro-culture, American politics and, of course, Afro-American cultural politics. But Ladd's poetry is Afrocentric without resorting to propaganda or cliche. Instead of representing black with shout-outs to Malcolm X or his 'hood, he's simply self-aware. While his performances are endowed with a Last Poets-style social commentary that keeps them grounded in reality, there's a clear post-apocalyptic vibe to pieces such as the wacky title track, "Blade Runner" or "I'm Building a Bodacious Bodega for the Race War," all of which borrow from the George Clinton/Sun Ra school of Afro-sci-fi-psychedelia.

Still, the most vital and engaging songs on Easy Listening are neither futuristic nor riddled with postmodern references. On both "The Tragic Mulatto Is Neither" and "Okrakoke," Ladd explores his connections to the past, from his fisherman granddaddy to his postbellum roots on the Carolina coast. These are not only the most tuneful and cohesive works on the album, they're the most soulful as well.

It may be said that by continually directing his gaze backward and forward, Ladd seems willing to deal with everything but the present. However, he understands the current moment to be ephemeral, gone before it's digested. So by balancing yesterday and tomorrow -- with a keen sense of the dictum "if you don't know where you've been, you can't know where you're going" -- Ladd's time-space equilibrium lands him squarely in the here and now. (*** 1/2)

-- Roni Sarig

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