Hybrids can be dangerous things. Take the horrid sub-category of rap/rock: for every “Walk This Way” resulting from a Run DMC/Aerosmith collaboration, you have hundreds of Linkin Park/Jay Z combos. It’s painful, dammit, and it takes two perfectly good things (although Linkin Park doesn’t get even that nod…) and makes something far, far worse. It’s like vegan soul food. Yes, yes it is.
On that note, when someone starts talking about putting emcees over dubstep tracks, that raises my bad taste threat level to orange. It could so easily go terribly, terribly wrong.
Luckily, Dutch group Zwart Licht seem to be doing it right. They’ve been collaborating since 2007, developing as dubstep has gone through its ascendancy, and while they have been more traditionally hip hop sounding, they’re making new forays into the crossover gray zone. Numbering two emcees and one dj/producer, the group actually brings the good parts of both genres to bear, giving you all the neck-breaking bass and synth action of dubstep and combining it with street-inflected rhymes.
It’s good times, and it piques my curiosity to see what comes next, and if this particular shark will be jumped.
Download: Zwart Licht – Dubtrip (Fs Green Remix)
Videos after the jump.
That second video was hella sick. I just started really getting into dubsteb recently, and digging a lot of what I’m hearing.
And yeah, the crossover stuff is hard for folks to do. You can’t just slam ish together and expect it to work.
bankuei
18 May 10 at 7:22 pm