Rod Lee Vol. 5: The Official
(2005, Club Kingz) @ 320 twankles per glisten
Alright, proud to introduce the pages of this blog to the tag "bmore", a city and club-music style that apparently don't get much love in the Bay - I pulled this disc out Rasputin's B-bin for a $1.99.
Rod Lee packs just about every element we respect here @ T&G into his dense and varied mixes - region-specific individualism, penetrating repetition & funk syncopation, explicit sexuality, audio theft and appropriation and an unusually healthy balance of street attitude & social criticism from a tough but uplifting perspective. The best sampling can take a sound you hate and suspend it in a such a way that it floats free of your negative associations and I can think of no better example of this phenomena than Rod Lee's use of Lil Jon's cartoonish sloganeering. I like his early crunk bass-chants but the change in his vocal style that marks his evolution into name-brand and pornstar rubs me like Jar Jar Binks.
I wonder why television's historical best failed to feature more local club soundtracking. I heard Technics did some consulting but that was only one episode and if I remember correct there was a stilted feeling reference to "Jiggle It" or something. And I'm not directly making the claim that Lee came up the whisper but I did still want to note that the official release date for this disc predates the Ying Yang full-length by a month or so.
