Busdriver

 

Busdriver: “Less Yes’s, More No’s”

From RoadKillOvercoat (Epitaph)

Hip-Hop//Out Now

6.0

Busdriver has already been tracked through PaperThinWalls a couple of  times

, so you may recall that he’s what is known as a “backpacker,” rapping rants at

 presidents and women instead of police and bitches, but also that denunciation

 of trendy anti-war “hippies,” as he keeps calling them, seems to relate to his 

frustration with himself, as an artist with a politics, who’s still way out on the margins.

 He’s been a member of L.A.s Project Blowed freestyle movement since the early

 90s, and things keep getting worse. Daddy Bush’s Iraq War was kind mellow,

 compared to W.’s,and they didn’t have botox back then either.

 Oh, Busdrivers’s got stuff to say 

about that too: his perspective has all sorts of large and small peaks and valleys

 (like the quality of his writing). It’s all part of the topography of his contorted 

(and contortionist’s) mask., a fistful of lines you can never smooth out, not for 

the lineup at Gitmo, nor even eBay, if he ever gets to be a hot enough prospect for

 either. But who isn’t, really?  Maybe not just anybody can be sold, but anybody

 can be bought, with or without knowing, or anyway caught. He knows that too,

 and it’s

 another reason to be frustrated: being poor and ugly-talking won’t save you, and

 being on the outside is in, trendwise and worldwise. Just ask Osama, and/or

 that illegal alien next door, paying payroll taxes toward benefits he can never 

ever dare to try to collect (gracias).

Throughout much of this album, Budriver seems to measure his sense 

of power by its absence, but it’s a phantom limb, a grid of neon nerves, 

at times almost vanishing amidst the thematically familiar nether regions of El Lay,

 ‘til the Infernal Sunshine Tours bus bounces big time, over potholes, speedbumps, 

and botox, so that sparks fly again:  impulses, images, IDs, ideas, idioms, can get 

get thick as stars and smog, but then he hands you a knife that can cut it, not just 

part it like Charlton Heston and  the Red Sea, but carve it up a bit. 

(This is Art, not Thanksgiving, turkey.)

The blade passed along through our focus track, 

“Less Yes’s, More No’s,” is sort of a basic, b-movie prison shiv, a piece of 

a tin can, maybe, used to dig up Busdriver’s  autopsy report on what

 Merle Haggard has long called Bush Wars: in both struggles,

 “you die in high numbers, says Dr. Busdriver, because of an addiction to oil. 

“The golden teat of an old elite” is cut ‘til we can definitely 

“the synthetic mammary gland,” and inside that is “an Iraqi oil drum,”

 so even  Hollywood Jis not so far from America after all!

But if this kind of thing makes your eyes hurt, 

don’t let it keep you from listening. The words ride the bus, and okay, 

they basically drive the bus, but the bus is the music, including

 Busdriver’s voice. (Although he doesn’t sing on this track,

 he’s almost as good a singer as he is an M.C. , 

which is very good indeed.)

The words may send the music around in circles, but the words 

are rough and twisty, so the circles are like crop circles: 

freaky around the edges, but the edges are pulled  around the whole holes. 

Circles remain circles, vowel sounds, even in disguise. Keyboards,

 keywords, low and urgent, press on, in place.

 “Every emphatic ‘no’ now and emphatic ‘yes’.” 

Might  be typos in the  CD booklet, the writer might mean “an,” 

for instance, but his voice, and the rest of the circling, nocturnal music,

 seem to mean that “and”--- not that “no” means “yes,”

 as the rapist translates,

 but that both are in the same place. Where our Busdriver seems 

to open the doors to the question: is there really such a thing,

 here and now, as a non-binding resolution?

 “Every emphatic ’no’ now and emphatic ’yes’ “!?