![]() Beauty and the Beat is an essential purchase for 2005, and takes an immediate spot on my 'Best Of' list for the year any record collection should be honored to count this disc among its ranks. While the rest of rap's superstars embark on that long journey towards creative (not to mention commercial) sameness, Edan is foraging a path not only for himself, but those rare outside artists who actually want to rework their chosen medium from the outside in. "The Science of the Two," "Smile" and the "What a Wonderful World"-esque "Promised Land" conclude the album, but "Beauty" is the pinnacle of the album, and the first time in years (since my tapedeck was sprained, in fact) that I heard something on CD that truly surprised me. From the opener "Polite Meeting," an instrumental that announces his intentions to flip the script on previous iterations of the Edan sound, Beauty is a brand new beat for the Bostonite: the gritty "Funky Voltron" sounds like it came from one of those million-dollar Stones Throw rare groove compilations "I See Colors" percolates with reverb as Edan's self-produced sound collage shuffles roughshod over verse-chorus-verse faultlines "Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme" slurs samples over breakbeats that bubble like hot grits while Edan schools any and all competitors and "Beauty" lives up to its name with a hodgepodge of string samples and funk beats before dropping the drums completely to allow the rapper to wreck expectations with a remarkable verse smarter than any others you'll hear this year. ![]() Octagon, Lateef and Lyrics Born's Latyrx and Paul Barman's It's Very Stimulating for its simultaneously adventurous eclecticism and fealty to essential genre underpinnings, but ultimately strikes out in a direction that shall henceforth be declared Edan's exclusive artistic province. ![]() A kaleidoscopic hip-hop odyssey that even the rapper's die-hard fans will likely be taken aback by, the record immediately joins the ranks of such left-of-center classics as Kool Keith's Dr. Flash forward three years, and Edan's follow-up Beauty and The Beat finally arrives, and it's a doozy. In 2005, he released the album Beauty and the Beat, which drew approbation for its ingenious lyricism as well as the production, which features samples from. ![]()
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