Damien HolstersComing up with clichéd one-liners to describe the full-length album of a lawyer-and-Democratic-activist-turned-rapper seems like a simple task, prior even to giving it a listen. A positive one? “A welcome, timely addition to conscious hip hop in the age of Trump.” Mixed? “An ambitious project wherein the artist might spread himself too thin, but which highlights how for him, rapping is more than a side quest.” Hyperbolically positive? Just go with his own description of the album on Genius: “A groundbreaking [!] take on political rap and hip hop songwriting” (One does what one can to get over; the less said about Pizon’s use of Genius, the better). Yet, reality is always queerer than what we anticipate. After a few listens, the one expression stuck in this writer’s head to describe Mic Scholar was rather something along the lines of “self-aggrandizing, cringey wankfest.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with braggadocio in rap, it’s the norm in certain styles. But if the skills don’t back it up, you just come across as incredibly vain. Confidence and bravado make one charismatic. Conquering without risk, then basking in your glory, is just off-putting. Pizon will claim to be the most interesting man in the world (in the namesake song), that he’s un-cancellable because his “ratings are too high” (“Life’s A Beach”), he will have a car-commercial-parroting outro labelling him a “rapper’s rapper” and “exquisite rhyme writer” (“No Verbs”). But what does he do that makes any of that convincing? Take a needless shot at NPR’s Tiny Desk series, which literally no one dislikes (“Keep doing your Tiny Desk Concerts, with tiny dick energy”)? Spit random-sounding lines like “Wanna be (…) lawyers who be breaking news like Reuters”? Advise his foes to “wear a face brace politically-speaking”, whatever that means? Is it maybe his ability to craft effortless hooks? They are indeed – only not in the sense of reaching excellence with minimum exertion, but rather in the sense of there being zero thought or care put into them. The choruses of “Bring Rawkus Back” or “No Verbs” are no more than those very titles being impassively repeated.
The latter is a good example of the sort of vanity that permeates this project. It’s a song where Pizon does not use any verbs (you can now fully appreciate how creative its title is). Constrained writing of the sort is hit or miss. For instance, this writer thinks that “Efectos Vocales”, by Spanish rapper Nach, a song in which each verse only features one vowel, is a tour de force, but he isn’t a fan of Nas’ “Rewind”, which he finds pointless and imperfectly executed. But at least, both make sense as technical games, and must have been challenging to pen. Writing a song without verbs is just… not that hard to do. Using a bunch of nominal sentences does the trick. If Pizon was telling a complex story, it might’ve been an accomplishment, but since he’s basically just describing himself, the only verb he had to leave out was actually “to be”.
Another example can be found on “Father Figure”, a tribute to his late father, which he supposedly wrote when he was 19, and a song which should’ve been one of the peaks of the album. In itself, it’s a pretty run-of-the-mill homage, with outdated female ad libs and an uninspired chorus reminiscing of weak mid-2000s RnB. Nothing to write home about, nothing to hate on. It would’ve been passable, if it wasn’t for Pizon’s counterproductive grandiosity. You can indeed write off affected lines like “he would leave a mark on me/ That’s invisible to the eye but ain’t hard to see in my artistry”, as nothing more than “the words of a grieving young man” who was being clumsily grandiloquent. But then in the outro, Pizon just had to go and tell us that he sent a demo of the song to a buddy of his, who listened to it in his car, and who of course had to pull over because he was too overwhelmed with emotion “to focus on his driving”. Cue the eye-roll.
Think of all the tear jerkers hip hop has to offer. Now, think of how it would cheapen them if their authors signed them off with such stagy outros, which explicitly told you how you were supposed to feel. Can you imagine Kendrick, Joey Badass, Ghostface or Last Emp doing so at the end of “Mother I Sober”, “Survivors Guilt”, “All That I Got Is You”, or “One Life”? Can you imagine Em doing a skit after “When Im Gone”, recounting how Paul had to get off his appartement bike and pause mid-protein shake because the song was too much for him to bear? (Wait, that would actually be pretty funny). The bottom line is that usually, when artists tell instead of showing, it’s because they don’t have much to show.
A third track that deserves closer attention is the album’s main single, “Bring Rawkus Back”, a song on which star feature Kool G Rap does Kool G Rap things, while Pi holds his own in terms of delivery. Conceptually, that song is a winner: rap as a genre does not have enough narrative non-fiction in its catalog, and when it does, it’s usually in the form of political rap (take for instance Vinnie Paz’s rogue history of the US in “You Can’t Be Neutral on A Moving Train”). Hip hop has a long and storied history, and rappers narrating it, or at least some of its notable episodes – such as Pi does with Rawkus Records – is absolutely laudable. (Songs of the same ilk would include CunninLynguists’ “Seasons” or Nas’ “U.B.R.”) The problem is that, for such a subject matter – to quote Rick Ross and Andre 3000 – a sixteen ain’t enough. Pizon’s verse is great, but only scratches the surface. Add to that the bland hook mentioned above, and you have a song that unfortunately feels rushed, and whose author’s abilities don’t seem to match his ambitions.
Taking all of the above into account, we might be tempted to say that on this project, Pi is at his best when he isn’t trying to be too clever, when he’s rhyming for fun and not trying to blow your mind with lousy pyrotechnics. When he’s being Mike Scala, and not this vainglorious, alleged mic scholar. As such, the best songs are the “ordinary” ones, whose retro beats you might find yourself nodding your head to if they play on the radio, and whose punchlines are occasionally excellent: “I speak for everyone, my pronouns are we and us” (“Life’s A Beach”) is the kind of quip we would’ve wanted more of from a voice involved in politics ; likewise, “if you’re paying LeBron, baby, I’m praying for Roe v Wade” (“Racing Thoughts”) is a fine play on Jay-Z’s most misunderstood bar. These are also the songs where some lesser-known artists get to shine, alas, sometimes to the detriment of Pizon. No one will expect him not to be outflowed by Kool G Rap or Styles P, but on the opening track, guest verses by Malik Marvel or Suu are smoother, slicker and better voice-modulated than his own. On “Handcuffs”, Timid’s verse is also on the verge of stealing the show, but lest we be overly critical, we can’t say he truly outshines Pizon. Speaking from the perspective of a racist cop, the latter complements his guest’s verse fittingly, and even if the message lacks a bit of subtlety – compare the track with Atmosphere’s “Pure Evil”, for instance – it’s easily the most accomplished song on the album (that banger of a beat sure helps). It’s songs like these that give the album any replay value it might have, because as mentioned, the supposed highlights either flat-out fail (“No Verbs”, “Father Figure”), or fail to deceive (“Bring Rawkus Back”).
No amount of boom bap nostalgia or sympathy for Pizon’s political activism (and – someone tell him – no amount of self-promotion on Genius) can hide the reality of Mic Scholar: it’s an average album, at the very best. One line from “The Most Interesting Man In The World” is representative of the whole project: “I need a doctor like I’m dissin’ Benzino”. We all know the doctor, we all know the song, we all know Em dissed Benzino. Ok, but where’s the punchline then? What do these two things have to do with one another? What are the multiple levels this line works on? Did Em really need Dre at that point in time more than any other? Wouldn’t “I need a doctor like I’m dissing Ja Rule” or “I’m cleaning out my closet like I’m dissing Benzino” make just as much sense, and be just as random? This is a perfect example of a pseudo-double entendre, and it illustrates the gist of the problem with this project: give it a careless listen, and it might the job, but take the time to analyze it, and it reveals itself as nothing but lame.