Freddie Gibbs & Madlib - Bandana

Let me start off by stating the obvious - hip-hop is not my bag. I try to keep up with it in an abstract sense, but I wouldn’t consider myself to be an outright hip-hop fan. Broadly speaking, most mainstream hip-hop doesn’t value the same things that I do as a musician and as a listener, but I don’t want to get too far down that rabbit hole today. Most of my favorite hip-hop records are often ones with just one or two producers (Foreign Exchange by RxPapi, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) by the Wu-Tang Clan) or are self-produced (Honor Killed the Samurai by Ka, Endtroducing… by DJ Shadow, Kanye West’s first three albums), so it makes sense that I’d be attracted to this album from Madlib and Freddie Gibbs.

I bought Bandana used at the Exchange outside Akron, OH, along with a bunch of other used hip-hop and heavy metal CDs. I had listened to Madvillainy in college and I had a hazy idea that Freddie Gibbs was acclaimed as well but didn’t know anything else.

The songs are mostly sampledelic, plundering film soundtracks, jazz, psych rock, soul. I don’t believe for a second that this was all produced on an iPad, that sounds like some Justice-style misdirection to me. Sometimes, Madlib leans into unpleasant sounds and turns them into strengths, like the tremolo time-stretched bass on “Freestyle Shit”. Other times, he just lets the sample speak for itself, like the jazz fusion cut “Crime Pays” or the crooning “Practice”. There’s an overall inventiveness, a playfulness to his beat-making that so much boom-bap revival is missing.

Freddie Gibbs is fearless on Bandana. He’s probably the best powder rapper I’ve ever heard. Credibility is one of the most important things a rapper can have, particularly when you’re rapping about cooking and dealing, and Gibbs has it in spades. His persona is ironclad. Intense but not aggressive. The bars are darkly funny at times, scathing at others. He takes shots at the record industry, rival dealers, and people who only love him now that he’s famous, but the primary target of his ire is the criminal justice system.

Gibbs has discussed writing a large portion of Bandana from an Austrian prison cell on rape charges (from which he was acquitted, and a touring partner found to blame), and I think that informs a lot of Bandana’s focus on the unfairness of the legal system. His christian upbringing (“Cataracts”) and his current faith in islam (“Gat Damn”) feature briefly, but illuminate his motivation for doing the nasty things he discusses. It’s a familiar refrain, but delivered with urgency - break the cycle, overthrow the system, and get yours while you can get it. God’s laws are too pure to be enacted on Earth, but God’s love is absent from those enacting the laws of man.

The features are sparing, but high-calibre, and demonstrate the poles of Gibbs’ lyrical interest. Pusha T (one of the other contenders for greatest powder rapper alive) and Killer Mike deliver one of the most fun rhyme-the-n-word-with-itself flows I can remember on “Palmolive”. Anderson .Paak meshes really well with Madlib on “Giannis” as he and Gibbs both spit about their come-up and struggles within the record industry. And then there’s “Education”, where the struggle for black liberation from under the thumb of a biased justice system grows more personal and violent as Yasiin Bey passes the mic to Black Thought and finally to Gibbs, angry and cold. The fact that Gibbs never seems out of place with these disparate topics against the greats shows his depth of knowledge and skill.

I’m usually pretty skeptical about beat switches and flow switches mid-song (I would almost always prefer the beat to develop more naturally), but the Penn & Teller sample that signals the rug pull in “Half Manne Half Cocaine” is hilarious. The swap on “Fake Names” is also really well executed, but the beat switches on “Flat Tummy Tea” and “Cataracts” don’t work as well for me.

Let’s peep this album art. The zebra striped CD is cool, I love how the artist and album title are cut out of the design in the CD’s original silver. The cartoon album cover is… merely OK. I appreciate the broken Piñata in the bottom right, but otherwise, it’s just an drawing of two cartoon animal representations of the artists looking over a flatly rendered hollywood on fire. Powerful imagery, but not as well executed as the contents of the disc. I would have liked to see a booklet with all the lyrics on it, but other than that this is pretty damn well designed. I do like that Madlib cites all of his primary samples on the inner cover, though.

Bandana by Freddie Gibbs and Madlib is a good album, and I like it.