End It All

While his previous effort, Thorns, offered "I'm the Ornette Coleman of this rap s**t," End It All opens with rapper/producer Beans declaring “I never lost, I’m still the boss/Because I’m a champion” as if avant hip-hop ever doubted it. “Superstar Destroyer” is, in many ways, a standard issue rap album-opener with boasts, insults, and challenges directed toward the competition, but anyone who has listened to Beans or his Antipop Consortium crew knows this literate wordsmith is no standard-issue rapper. Here, he at least plays with the idea for just over half an hour by letting outside producers bring the beats, although with names like Four Tet, Clark, and Interpol’s Sam Fogarino behind the boards, the results are atypical. Fogarino’s production is a swaying mass of fog that influences the rapper to imagine Kool Keith as a Vanity Fair reader (“You and your crew are queens/Like Helen Mirren”), while Son Lux’s electro-acoustic construction is so interesting, Beans breaks the fourth wall and asks listeners how they can stomach “whack rappers” and “you ain’t lose your lunch yet?” The case is made well throughout this solid effort, so it might elicit feelings of guilt in those who allow both Antipop and G-Unit into their lives, but make no mistake, End It All is difficult and won’t woo away anyone fully invested in the mediocre. It’s a prickly landscape as off-kilter sounds meet off-kilter ideas, all as Beans does the relentless, stern delivery thing, kicking it poetry slam style and giving listeners no easy hook to hold onto as the avant whirlwind spins. Freed from the producer’s chair, Beans is able to write more lyrics, and this word-filled effort should make fans of his lines ecstatic, especially those who like it when he’s less serious and able to drop pop culture stingers like “Terminator Tutti better follow Mrs. Garrett’s advice/These are the facts of life/My mic sounds nice.” End It All is too advanced to be the “Superstar Destroyer” it sets out to be, but to Beans' point, if all underground rap releases were this good, true hip-hop heads wouldn’t have the time to listen to anything else.