This second full-length album from New York City's J-Live showcases an increasingly popular brand of hip-hop music: competent, decidedly independent and exciting like a standardized test. I picked up this album because it was touted as an Independent (with a capital "I") parallel to early De La Soul albums and I had heard some of his early tracks which were enjoyable and promising.Coup d'Etat
I tried, unsuccessfully, to listen to this album on my car trip back from Pennsylvania this weekend with my sister and my girlfriend. We were so disinterested in the album that we popped it out before it was finished and didn't even return to it when we were stuck in a 45-minute traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge. That's never a good sign. All three of us are De La Soul fans so we decided to listen to the real thing and put in "Buhloone Mind State" instead, which reinforced the reasons why "All of the Above" fails the test. J-Live's voice sounds a lot like Dove from De La Soul, but without De La's combination of singular beats and abstract, singsong vocals, the effect falls flat.
I feel bad trashing him because I appreciate what he's trying to do: return the spirit, creativity and jazz-inflected beats of the early nineties to current hip-hop. Unfortunately, each song comes off like a labored, calculated effort to do just that. He keeps reminding us that he is the great independent hope, the savior of "true" hip-hop but doesn't exhibit the inventiveness of Mos Def, The Roots, or even recent De La Soul (who he shouts out here as a guiding influence). The main failure of the album is that he spends so much time instructing the listener on the sorry state of modern hip-hop that he makes no contribution to reenergizing it. There are some bright spots on the album though, including the song "Travelling Music" with its sweetly nostalgic lyrics and instrumental combo of live vibes, bass and organic cymbals. He also has some clever lyrical turns, as on the "The 4th 3rd" in which he rhymes:
 
- "Running from a paradox/
living like a pair of ducks/
but with different flocks/
with different destinations/
our ships remain docked"
More often though, his blatant attempts to highlight his superior lyrical content shows through in choruses like, "It's just that consciousness comes through on nights like this." On another chorus, he makes a reviewer's job way too easy by asking, "Are you satisfied? I'm not satisfied." I wish I was J, but I'm not either.
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