Rhymefest
Photo: Mick Rock
Hip-hop pays lip service to keeping it real. Lately, though, the genre has seen a glut of performers trotting out gangster personae. Rhymefest never puts on a costume, and he doesn't pretend to be hard. "I want to fight the wackness that rap has become," he says. "What we need are rappers who are both truthful and entertaining."
(Playboy, March 2007)
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Blue Collar
Rhymefest — Blue Collar
Rating: 
("fucking brilliant")
A balanced mix of streetwise swagger, self-deprecating modesty and big boasts — all served up with infectious beats and a quick wit — Blue Collar, the hotly anticipated debut from Chicago rapper Rhymefest, taps into the formula that Kanye West made famous. Line for line, Rhymefest quickly establishes himself as a perceptive MC with few peers. "Blue collar rap, why call it that?" he asks, rhetorically, on the Just Blaze produced "Dynomite (Going Postal)." He answers over the course of the entire album, spelling out how hustling isn't limited to dealing and being from the streets isn't a euphemism for gangbanging. Both mean doing what you have to do to get by, and Rhymefest is in the corner of anyone willing to put in the hours to get ahead in the game.
Several tracks come out swinging against the evils of excess ("More") and the perils of unsafe sex. Rhymefest even takes aim at Army recruiters on the song "Bullet," attacking those who lure young men to their doom with misleading promises of escape. But he's also as funny as he is incisive, asking Ol' Dirty Bastard for advice in "Build Me Up" and warning his listeners to keep an eye on their ladies in "All Girls Cheat." "Fever" takes Peggy Lee's sultry number to new places (Rhymefest is the one that's hot), "Devil's Pie" makes the Strokes funky and "All I Do" posits Rhymefest as just a hard-working schlub who happens to have skills on the mike. This disc is primed to bust through the door Kanye unlocked.
— Joshua Klein (courtesy of Playboy.com)
