BLAKROC ALBUM SONGS FREE

The rappers, removed from hip-hop's Stage IV commerciality, are free to just rock a beat. Maybe this is why the rhymes have the immediacy of street-corner battle rhymes. It's the kind of thing that began not as a project to unearth a common ancestor from the Delta silt but as a couple of guys screwing around in rehearsal, trying to make their favorite hip-hop sounds on rock instruments in the same way early DJs tried to emulate disco remixes with their turntables. Their playing on 'Hard Times' and 'Ain't Nothing Like You' is so studied, it's effortless. Auerbach and Carney are both just cresting 30, part of a generation of musicians who grew up on their parents' album rock and their own cassettes of the only real rock stars the '90s could offer: rappers. Each of their side projects released last year (drummer Carney's with the band Drummer) bears only a faint connection to the music they've made together.įor this next trick, they teamed with Damon Dash, whose Roc half of the common band, album, and record-label name is a nod to Roc-A-Fella, which he cofounded with Jay-Z, and who wrangled the hip-hop talent. Their impulse to tear shit up has gone from blunt-force primitivism to collaborating with Gnarls Barkley instigator Danger Mouse for 2008's spacey Attack and Release. The Black Keys grew restive after issuing a guitar-and-drums blues challenge to the White Stripes from the other side of Lake Erie, five rec-ords ago, in 2002. Auerbach and Carney's muscular climb up the slippery slope, where a misstep could slide them into a trough of Limp Bizkit, is a swaggering assertion of musicians' will over form. But for all this hip-hop talent, they really just do what they do, which is rhyme over beats. Mos Def's tenor-sax-like phrasings pop and sizzle like ice cubes dropped in a deep fryer, newcomer NOE is a holy-shit vocal dead ringer for Jay-Z, and RZA, Raekwon, and ODB recall all of Wu-Tang's gritty greatness. The rappers make it great, stepping up their game to flow with Auerbach and Carney's bluesy swing. It's all live instruments and live vocals.' Unlike every hip-hop and rock blind-date hookup augured by Aerosmith's miming 'Walk This Way' with Run-DMC, fusing hip-hop and rock isn't the goal but a starting place. In this case, it's Auerbach's declaration, 'No samples are used on the album. The highest praise is that it's just music, made the way great records always have been: by a group of musicians really going after something. So is it a hip-hop or a rock record? It depends on what you're hearing or - listening for - in each song. But the band's Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, as pasty as any young men ever to come from northern Ohio, are experts at tapping into an even deeper delusion: Badass music makes you a badass, too. It's why BlakRoc, the new collective, begs some suspension of disbelief, what with blues-rock duo the Black Keys backing MCs like Mos Def, Ludacris, Q-Tip, and assorted surviving members of the Wu-Tang Clan. Down syndrome: the fantasy that being into hip-hop makes a goofy white kid any less goofy.

Blakroc album songs