by Will Sisskind (@theparisbuns)
A good beat burns a hole in the brain like a fat wad of cash burns a hole in the pocket. When coming upon a stack of hundred-dollar bills, the average human will use at least one or two to treat themselves -- perhaps some friends or a significant other -- to a nice meal or a couple of drinks or a night on the town. Musicians sitting on a collection of beats -- or chord progressions, or riffs, or snippets of lyrics -- will want to use them in a track, lest those thoughts fester and wither like Benjamins in the rain.
Fortune favored Chicago rapper Verbal Kent, therefore, when he came across a trove of lo-fi master Lord Beatjitzu’s work. The result comes in the form of the self-titled debut album of Dueling Experts, a collaboration between Kent and Ghanian underground legend Recognize Ali. The boom-bap beats have a crackling sound, as if they belong on a third-generation VHS tape of someone’s big Sony cassette deck. This -- the mark of Beatjitzu, in homage to early Wu-Tang and their Nineties hip-hop colleagues small and large -- creates an energetic base for Kent and Ali to trade verses and give each other equal time to do so. Though they trade barbs, they share no bad blood; they direct their flow as a solitary unit, a force of two engineers of vocabulary become one.
Dueling Experts comes from years of Kent and Ali working together on features, so the two artists have a natural vibe. This makes their tracks on Dueling Experts feel seamless. Beatjitzu’s sample-rich beats provide the thread, and Kent and Ali use their needling verses to sow their lyrical patches into a heavy blanket. The listener can tuck themselves in and get lost in the sound if they like, or they can drape it over their shoulders like a cape and jam out to their heart’s content.
And like a blanket, Dueling Experts has comforting elements, such as its moments of nostalgic tape hiss and retro samples. Kent and Ali cut through the coziness with their razor-sharp wit and wordplay. On a track like “Two Isn’t Enough,” the duo announces the power of their union and the onslaught that they could unleash upon the world, as well as how much more damage they could do with a thousand of themselves. Kent and Ali seek to wake the masses with their debut collaboration, but the interruption of slumber is less of a sudden opening of the blinds and more of an easy sunrise on a spring day, where something good has just started to bloom.
The collaboration between Verbal Kent and Recognize Ali stands as a testament to the creative process, of making something from nothing out of curiosity. All great hip-hop -- if not all great music -- starts this way, with a good-sounding kick or a line or a serendipitous turn of a knob on a sampler. Then a couple of minds get together and multiply that one idea into a million. Dueling Experts -- the result of those million ideas, honed into a steady piece of music -- should give any creator pause before letting their curiosity go to waste.