Blue Scholars: Bayani Redux (Duck Down: 2009)
This album is the perfect hiphop album and there will never be a better one.
This is a contentious take, so I want to be clear: Bayani Redux does not have the most interesting composition (Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp A Butterfly), the best flow (RA Scion & Gifted Youngstaz: TRUE||FORM: Genuflexion EP), the most skillful storytelling (Noname: Telefone), or the most affecting narrative (Nujabes ft Shing02: Luv(sic) Hexology).
But every single track in this album knows exactly what it is doing, and does exactly what it needs to do to achieve it. There are no duds. Like all good rap, it is geographically and temporally situated; it doesn¦t take itself too seriously but it takes itself seriously enough. Geo describes it well in the final lines of “Second Chapter”: « To survivors of economic and natural disasters, living for the right here and not the here·after: a handful of tracks, each a snapshot to capture the trials, and tribulations, and smiles. »
Bayani Redux is exactly that. Each track is a snapshot in time, somewhere and someplace between Honolulu, 1980 and Seattle, 2009. It describes the joy, struggle, infighting, and kinship of being a young West Coast communist in a time when the War on Terror was in full swing, police departments were militarizing, the Great Recession was looming, and the spirit of radicalism seemed to have collapsed into dust.
« Things happen for a reason, they say, but I say there¦s a reason things happen. » Our collective amnesia about the Bush years does us no favours in trying to understand the present or where we can go from here. Bayani Redux offers a bit of an antidote, not by transcending hiphops potential as an artform, but by perfectly enacting it.
Favourite track: All of them; this album has no duds. But, okay, “Morning of America”.