Blue Scholars - "Bayani"

Blue Scholars - The Distance (Mass Line Media 2007)

Blue Scholars - Bayani / Mass Line Media

It's likely that you've seen the artwork and the advertisements for Seattle's Blue Scholars making their rounds on various websites and publications for the past month, but the saturation in pre-album publicity was well deserved. There's your spoiler. Blue Scholars are arguably Seattle's finest hip-hop group (with apologies to Common Market, of course) and certainly among the pantheon of the most respected to come from the Emerald City. But what separates it from the rest of the "conscious" hip-hoppers out there?

Okay, starting off with "Baha'i Healing Prayer" is a radically different approach to the recent hip-hop fascination with Middle Eastern sounds (50 Cent's "Candy Shop" being the most immediate example I can think of). By that I mean, it's an actual taste of the Middle East as opposed to just appearing that way. Naturally, the more subtle tone is that this is going to be a political album with some seriously heavy content. Sure enough, Geologic and his cohort DJ Sabzi take their second-generation immigrant voices and undertake the most ambitious kind of album: That which deals with the politics and the people on both a local level and a global one.

The reason I say it succeeds is because, for me, Geologic's delivery may not be the most aurally engaging (especially for 15 songs clocking in at just under an hour) and Sabzi's rich musical background may not always shine through on his easy-going beats, but at the end of the day hip-hop is not necessarily about the method. It's about the message, and these guys have nabbed theirs down solidly. There's no question where they stand on Iraq ("Back Home"), the World Trade Organization ("50 Thousand Deep"), and immigration ("Xenophobia"). And what's best is that, while I've never been to Seattle, I can easily get a feel or at least a mental map of the city through the references that they weave in and out of their Big Picture flow. What's even better is that Sabzi's beats start off slow, but the middle of this album is so strong that I was astonished how well he came around. Changed my whole opinion of Geologic's delivery indirectly, because up to that point I had been on the fence about how strong this album really was all together rather than just as halves of the whole.

That may be the best part about this album, in fact. All the horns and snapping fingers and added vinyl hissing in the world can't mask a weak album lyrically, but Geologic has come through with arguably his best performance yet and certainly one of the better full-album deliveries of the year. In Geologic's ethnic background of Filipinio, Bayani refers to "heroes of the people." In Sabzi's Iranian background, Bayani means "the divine word." On their second album here, Blue Scholars have arguably achieved both not just for a generation of Seattle hip-hop heads but also for kids out there looking for inspiration in positive hip-hop. If Rhymesayers just isn't enough anymore, Blue Scholars and the Mass Line crowd are your answer.

The title-track Geologic rhymes that it's "gonna take more than just rain to change us." The truth of that is, they've already been changed. Two university students with a debut and an EP were hungry, but battle-tested and people-approved, Both Geologic and Sabzi have re-emerged to deliver the most consistent album to come out of Seattle maybe since their debut. Whatever the case, don't make the mistake of not picking this up just because of some negative press. If talking about the war or squalor in Seattle isn't your bag, stay the hell away. You probably shouldn't be listening to hip-hop in the first place. Club anthems are your bag, kid. This is why Blue Scholars are hot. Stooping to that level doesn't win plaudits, it wins cheap videos and cheaper hoes. In times such as ours, there's only so much of that a listening audience should be able to take. For one more album at least, we have something to keep our minds off the mindlessness of the clubs. I'll raise some Crown to that.