Spotify continues to provide excellent content, this time with the release of a 2009 live recording of the Cunninlynguists album “A Piece of Strange,” the southern rap group’s most concentrated and thematically structured concept album to date. Cunninlynguists is a group you likely haven’t heard of, but your favorite rappers have. The group, which consist of emcees Deacon the Villain and Natti and producer/occasional emcee Kno, have attracted collaborations with rappers from all corners: from classic California artists Del The Funky Homosapien and E-40, to Philly rappers Celph Titled and Apathy, to the bigger names of today such as Freddie Gibbs, Aesop Rock, and Big Krit, to name only a few; everyone wants to work with them.
Perhaps their most important collaboration has been with Club Dub, a little know band from Lexington, Kentucky, who provide the instrumentals not just for the occasional track not entirely produced by Kno, but for the live rendition of “A Piece of Strange.” Kno’s production, particularly in the early years, relied heavily on funk and jazz sounds that lent themselves to instrumental performance. Club Dub backs the group admirably on this live album, bringing Kno’s production to life.
Live hip hop is a tricky thing. It can be relentlessly boring to hear your favorite rapper regurgitate verses over the same beat you heard on the album being essentially played off of a computer. Live hip hop bands, most notably The Roots, bring an unparalleled energy to the performances and allow for the same improvisational room that genres like funk and jazz, from which hip hop comes, are afforded. A collaboration with The Roots and Cunninlyguists would be a dream come true for this listener, but I digress.
“A Piece of Strange Live in NYC 2009” is the right treatment for an album as full of life as “A Piece of Strange,” and the album, whether you listen to the live or studio version, is just as relevant today as it was seven years ago. The overarching theme is of a black experience in the South, which is common to Cunninlynguists’ work, two of them being black and all of them being from the South. “A Piece of Strange” depicts this experience in their most narrative effort, and places heavy emphasis on the morality and guilt that their character carries, and what it’s internal and external stimuli are. Sprawling and epic, the album takes on various stages of life. “Hourglass” is a coming of age track that deals with adolescent experiences from finding your trusted group of friends to early intimate experiences. “Brain Cell” looks at the series of decisions and the circumstances that lead to a life of crime, with an eerie comparison of a baby’s crib to a jail cell in the first lines:
“You was manifested in an egg, developed in a womb
Born out of a moon belly, first day of doom
Crying out like you wanna be put back in there
Maybe later in an incubator for more care
Alone, get to your home and your cribs set
Put behind bars and you ain't even lived yet”
Appropriately, this track is followed by “America Loves Gangster,” an examination of how media depictions of beloved characters like Tony Soprano or Tony Montana end up glamorizing crime for some viewers.
The last quarter of the album sees the protagonist reckoning with his life, including a doomed debate with the devil at the gates of Hell, the experiences of hellfire, and a cathartic and ultimately sympathetic look at why people of all ages, races, and creeds go against their morals at various points in life, with the track “The Light:”
“Ain't nobody on this earth been perfect since birth
Sinning and doin’ the ‘erk and jerk in Church
Then the next minute be back to puttin’ in work
Jumpin’ into them holes not lookin’ in first”
By the album’s end you feel something not regularly offered from a rap album: the completion of a journey. In an expansive and consistently great body of work, “A Piece of Strange” still stands out as Cunninlynguists’ most mature and timeless album. It is a fulfilling listen from beginning to end, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to hear it live.
