A collaboration with Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck saw the grossly hacked-off hip-hop aggressors, 7L and Esoteric release their debut album, The Soul Purpose in the summer of 2001 – some ten years after their inception at a college radio station north of Boston. A love of golden, old-skool hip-hop (1985-89) brought them together and on this evidence it’s what keeps them together, although it’s ostensibly more rap specific than it is the hop. That said, DJ / producer 7L supplies some core and imaginative ideas that always threaten to break out. Perhaps it’s this that gives them that brooding, barely contained hostility, with 7L’s slash and strike string attack on ‘Murder Death Kill’ providing one of the most weirdly transgressional loops in rap thus far. With its terse, uncomplicated beats and a bare skeleton of samples this is as brusque and as bare as it gets for hip-hop today. The boys cut a groove and they stick to it. ‘Touchy Subject’ takes a sly, walking bassline, adds some prattling guitar licks and slips it under one ultra smooth flow; the effect is one thick slab of reason within a jumble of misinformation.
The cover art tells much of the story: it’s a tastefully mature and political affair, tinged by espionage and congressional malpractices. On “Loud & Clear”, 7L’s middle-eastern backcloth provides a suitable screen for Esoteric to illustrate political corruptness: “We got people overseas getting blown to bits, and thrown in a ditch, while Bush is at the game throwing the opening pitch” and “See, they all talk like Republican radio really, only right-winger I support is Cam Neely.”
In light of Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ it’s a surprisingly sensitive yet passionate commentary on contemporary apartheid issues.