Waxing prophetic Edan's struggles with rap's relevance; the Perceptionists' new perceptions BY NICK SYLVESTER

"Pretty much all it is is talking to beats." That’s about as uninformed a dismissal of an entire art form as someone’s saying of photography, "All you do is press a button." You might expect it out of anyone who’s not hip. But out of a rapper? Worse, out of a really talented one like Boston’s Edan?

Well, he said it, but he had a point to make. As rap has taken on more cultural weight, transcending itself to become a medium of personal expression and social commentary (just don’t call it the "CNN of the Streets"), its focus has moved from skills to story line. You’re nothing mainstream without a few bullets in you. Less polish means a reciprocal degree of authenticity. Knock art but don’t dare knock the hustle. This shift has produced some great acts, but Edan still sees the democratization of hip-hop as its most pressing crisis. His new Beauty and the Beat (Lewis) struggles with hip-hop’s rise in social importance and correlating drop in musical integrity — the wax of the artist, the wane of the art.

"What you get are people who aren’t thinking from a musician’s standpoint because they don’t need to to rap," he explains when I catch up with him. "And these are people who are more likely to become athletes than musicians, but they rap. The same way athletics is testosterone-driven and full of machismo, so is their shit when it comes to music, and they’re barely musicians."

That’s overstepping it a little. But a quick survey of our current G-landscape does show pro forma thugs like 50 Cent and the Game going through kid-tested mother-approved motions on some get-rich-quick shit, profiting off tradition and ultimately all dropping the same rhymes about their Escalades and Jesus pieces because they don’t know how to say anything else. "I’m tired of all this shit, where people think it’s cute for a minute in music to celebrate taboos," Edan says. "Is it still thrilling to talk about some sex shit all the time? Do farts still make you laugh? Get over this shit."

Okay, so hip-hop can’t keep cannibalizing itself if it wants to remain relevant. The battle cry should be, "Let’s push things forward!" But who’s doing that? The alt-rap abstract camps — Anticon, Def Jux, Mush, Lex, and the rest — contend they have a lock on it. But as Edan puts it in his track "Rock and Roll," "The underground is made of velvet/With brothers soft talk tough on wax/But they ain’t sell shit."

In short, mind-over-heart futuristic flows, fragmented lyrics, and a production ethos that sees danceable rhythms as musical cancer. But protecting rap doesn’t have to mean denying it of its pleasure and color and relevance. "Some people are trying to put up this smoke screen and hit you with the impression that they’re light years ahead of you," Edan says. "They mask themselves in all these unorthodox ideas and things that are almost blinding so someone will say, ‘Yo they fuckin’ way ahead, yo, what the fuck are they doing? I’m baffled.’ I ain’t trying to baffle nobody with Beauty and the Beat. Just trying to figure out what works best."

Not every album has an agenda — hey, most albums blow yo. But Beauty and the Beat has two of them. The first is to restore the art of rap — not as a vehicle for social upwardness or even commentary, just as an elevated style of art. Edan is concerned with the music of hip-hop: "This shit is a majestic art form, and it has the potential to encapsulate the most intricate musical ideas." From his ’60s psych-rock samples and open celebration of his own musicianship, you can see that he’s eager to locate himself within the rap-as-art genealogy. Check "I See Colours" ("Prince Paul already used this loop/But I’m gonna keep you movin’/And put you up on the scoop") or the album’s other big single, "Fumbling over Words That Rhyme," which traces the history of skill pushers and production innovators but offers no empty shout-outs. Kool Herc and Wu and Nas make the cut, but this roll call is most noteworthy for who’s missing — no 50, no Puffy, no Roc-A-Fella.

If Edan’s first impulse is to reconnect with rap’s healthy past, his second is to instill rap with confidence in its own power. Not with smoke screens, just with natural accidents, surprises. He handles all the album’s production — "EDAN CONCENTRATING ON PUT SYD BARRETT FACE ON BIZ MARKIE BODY AND KOOL G RAP BRAIN," as his Web bio offers. Sounds nasty. But he finishes up with something much more wholesome, if only because he’s honest about his influences and eager to embrace them in new and novel ways. "I have a bit of a tendency to rebel against the imprisonment of the sequencing and wanting to sound a little bit more human," he explains.

And Edan has indeed come into his own on the mike, forgoing the fanboyish yelps of 2001’s Primitive Plus (Solid) for a gruffer, more confident delivery. Dude’s gonna get called an egomaniac for some of these lines ("Connect the dots with all the faggots making records/Who couldn’t suck a dick or put the gloss on their upper lip"), but he backs it up 20-fold, fashioning internal rhymes with ease ("I use pens like hallucinogenics/So who could pretend my music ain’t a beautiful thing") and alluding to everything from The Lord of the Rings to Salvador Dalí. He’s dense but never difficult to follow, esoteric but never alienating. And consistent in persona: "I could never use the facade of a musician/To celebrate hate and abuse women/The beautician is back/Humble magnificent wizard of rap wearing tuxedos on the wax."

What’s more, by concentrating on the æsthetics of rap, Edan has made some of the more poignant extra-musical comments in recent memory. Focusing on the music means denying the tropes around him: "Cuz when the beats sound iffy and kids buck lies/It’ll be a sad like when the Biz Mark dies." And when he gravitates toward the surreal in the latter half of Beauty and the Beat, he comes off half-hopeful/half-pessimistic on the issue of whether rap will collapse on itself. With lyrics and production interacting at unusual paces, he offers a modern and conflicted ending for an album so rife with compelling artistic struggle. "I don’t know which part of my built-in nostalgia has to do with a dreadful suspicion that we’re heading in the wrong direction, and it leads me to sorta cling to yesterday, because that was a purer place than we are today. I don’t know if that’s part of me subconsciously; it may be."

Beauty and the Beat doesn’t answer that question. But its arrival in 2005 reminds us both of rap’s great possibilities and of the myriad rappers who’ve failed to achieve them.

HIP-HOP’S SPIRIT of artistic competition grew out of gang culture. But there was a time before the after-party became the party, and the Perceptionists allude to that golden age in "Let’s Move": "Fuck a battle we got nothing to prove/Perceptionists provide the people with the groove." The Perceptionists are a trio of Boston-bred hip-hoppers — rappers Mr. Lif and Akrobatik and DJ Fakts One — who’ve just released their debut album, Black Dialogue (Def Jux). And they’ve been touring since March. In a sense, the disc is just an inducement to the public to come to the crew’s parties — yet another return to party-centric b-boy culture. "This is just the new b-boy shit as far as I’m concerned," Mr. Lif says over the phone from Boulder. "This is just what happens when you try to make a record just for fun."

Which isn’t to say Black Dialogue lacks the vitriol of Lif’s black-conscious solo work on 2002’s Emergency Rations EP and I Phantom (Def Jux) — the spit’s just mixed in with songs about everything from straight partying to long-distance relationships to WMDs, all set to beats for the feets. "We’re hired to throw a party as far as I’m concerned," Lif says. "It’s so funny to me that you can send a tremor through the independent hip-hop world if you have a beat on your record you can dance to. You know, we made our record knowing we were gonna be doing like 200 shows so we were like, ‘Hey, fuck it, man, we better be having fun if we’re gonna be doing 200 shows.’"

Straddling party hedonism and social consciousness isn’t always easy. "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?/We’ve been looking for months and ain’t found nothing" is pretty flat — and a total bummer at a party. And the crew can overcompensate with antithetical cash-moneyism: "We’re onto the next phase/New album world tour let’s get paid." Ak and Lif fare best when they’re not fighting their own "conscious rapper" status, instead taking issue with rap culture, not just from Edan’s artistic angle but with respect to how rap reflects on blacks and black art. On the title track, Lif drops, "Corny niggers switch it up and rent it to Viacom," then goes one step farther: "These niggas all want homes in the Hamptons/It’s a minstrel show so they do what white man ask them/Throw the money at the screen." Then one step more: "We’d rather teach each other how to fire chrome than to buy a home/There’s power in the land that we own/You need capital to start to win in capitalism/Take the money from the sales and buy some places for living."

It gets confusing, though, when on the next track, "Fram Rupture," Lif calls for Farrakhan-informed resegregation: "There’s plenty of us out there who might dare/Form an independent state to right this small fear/We’ll have our own laws own schools own cash too/And none of these funds will flow to you." These answers the Perceptionists offer for pushing rap and black culture forward seem to contradict each other. But hey, at least they’re offering them.

You can follow the Perceptionists’ tour at www.mrlif.com.