A confident sick flow. I had no idea what it meant before this album, and I’ve barley a grasp of it now. In fact I’m pretty awkward when it comes to trading parlance with genres like this. A bit of a Jerry Lewis/Nutty Professor kind of figure stumbling through a corridor of beautiful women, none of which I could ever realistically approach with any real kind of assurance. But confident and sick this Chicago MC’s flow is. It’s also culturally astute, intelligent and expanding – like all great hip-hop should be. What’s more the production is as tight as a gnats arse.
With the help of a collection of seasoned rappers, including Vast Aire (formerly of Cannibal Ox), Lyrics Born and Jean Grae, Diverse wrestles rhymes from a lush, warm soup of 70s soul and funk; more moody than mean, more salubrious than sinister, and tastefully and heavily layered without ever coming close to lacking in coherence.
Production comes courtesy of the mighty Rjd2, Prefuse-73 and Madlib.
A good day for hip-hop. A good day for you and me.