Reviews

-- Sam Prestianni

Goodie Mob
Still Standing
(LaFace/Arista)

Judging from the hype in the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, Goodie Mob's second recording, Still Standing, is the finest hip-hop album of the year and a harbinger of intelligent rap from an untapped region of the country. Well, it's a good recording, but Goodie Mob are hardly the heirs of Parliament/Funkadelic legacy, as the Voice claims. And if Rolling Stone hasn't heard Southern hip hop before, then its writers need to get out of the office.

The quartet, who take their name from the condensation of "the good die mostly over bullshit," do play with loopy Clinton-esque mysticism. One of the members, Khujo, notes in the group's bio that he'd rather be called a messenger than a rapper, and that if you assign the letters of his name to their numerical positions in the alphabet, add them up, and divide by five you get 13, the number of change. (You also get my bullshit detector going off like a car anti-theft alarm.)

Meanwhile, Atlanta, where the Goodies live, has been a center of black popular music for most of the decade, home to producers like Dallas Austin and Jermaine Dupri and boosting such acts as Outkast, TLC, and Da Brat into prominence. In fact Atlanta has been hot for so long that an alternative Southern center is developing in Virginia (Teddy Riley, Missy Elliott, and others).

Nevertheless, Still Standing has several intelligent songs and bristles with ideas, challenging cornerstone thought about African-American identity and criticizing fundamental hip-hop posturing. "The Experience" tackles the thorny issue of the n-word. "You're not a nigga 'cause you're black/ You're a nigga 'cause of how you act," they conclude, leaving open both negative and positive interpretations of the word. "They Don't Dance No Mo' " berates hip-hop nationalists for lacking the ability to lose themselves in the music and dance.

Still Standing isn't a hip-hop classic. Similar songs are bunched together and the group's delivery doesn't allow the members' personalities to stand out. But the record is better than 1995's Soul Food, and Goodie Mob could one day make a great album. They've surrounded themselves with good producers (Organized Noize), good tourmates (the Roots, the Fugees), and they think their ideas through.

But for now, we're stuck with a decent album and overheated record reviews, which calls into question mainstream hip-hop criticism. Passionate connoisseurship of hip hop doesn't come from an enthusiastic appreciation of funk, or of contemporary black art, or of any other aspect of current black bohemia -- it comes from hip hop itself. But most mainstream hip-hop criticism comes from black bohemia. On Still Standing, Goodie Mob -- unlike, say, Common -- play to that audience. Yet, both the hip-hop nation and black bohemia are viable without one leaning the other. Hip-hoppers probably know this, and I wish the black bohos would figure it out.

-- Martin Johnson