The Rockaliser 30: Edan, Beauty and the Beat (2005)

[Welcome To the Rockaliser 30, a month-long series devoted to classic albums that have been eclipsed, forgotten, misheard, or otherwise not given their propers. This is Day Twenty. Archive here.]

Hip-hop has a long history of mind-bending beats and rhymes. From Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” to Cannibal Ox’s “Iron Galaxy,” rappers have launched their futuristic epics into outer space. Lil Wayne has unequivocally declared that he’s from Mars, and Del Tha Funkee Homosapien has given us an album set in the year 3030. Science-fiction is alive and well in hip-hop, but the genre has never embraced traditional psychedelia in quite the same way.

On his 2005 LP Beauty and the Beat, Boston MC, DJ, producer and Bob Dylan lookalike Edan makes up for lost time. He does it by building his songs as straight hip-hop, before splattering them in day glo. This is a man who understands the culture--he once released a mixtape of 20 songs that sample “Funky Drummer.” And he produces, rhymes, and scratches on his records, while most dudes stick to just one of those skills (if you get a chance to see him live, go: he DJs and raps simultaneously, all while projecting his assured, slightly nerdy form of braggadocio).

For Beauty, Edan digs deep into his crates, surfacing with an army of psych samples that are trippy and obscure as hell. He laces the whole album with groovy sound effects and weird soundbites, and turns the reverb up. Check out “Making Planets”: Edan, live from an echo chamber, spits the first verse as mellifluous noises orbit his lazy bassline. Halfway through, the track disintegrates, giving life to a swirl of primary colors, and a verse from fellow Bostonian Mr. Lif. Other song titles here, like “I See Colors,” and and the album cover give an indication of the strain of hip-hop that Edan’s dealing in. On “Promised Land,” he paints a tune as delicate and wistful as anything on Odyssey and Oracle, although I don’t recall any Zombies lyrics about asteroid belts or slapping a 40 ounce to the ground.

Lyrically, psychedelia works well for the Humble Magnificent, as Edan calls himself. On his early releases, including 2002 debut Primitive Plus, his persona was that of the class clown, if the class clown rushed home to study up on hip-hop history after school. With the acid-inspired imagery of Beauty, he inches towards a more distinctive outlook (“I wear the Prime Meridian as a wristband”), though he’s still given to goofy brags and discoursing on rap history. On “Rock And Roll,” Frank Zappa, the 13th Floor Elevators, the Velvet Underground, King Crimson, Black Sabbath and H.P. Lovecraft all get lyrical love from Edan.

We haven’t heard much from Edan lately. He dropped the Echo Party mixtape in 2009, further melding Golden Age sounds with dubby, colorful production. He didn’t rap on it. I saw him live in 2011, and he killed in front of a tiny, distracted audience. But there’s been no new album, and very little production work, since 2005. Let’s hope for a Born Like This-style reemergence sometime soon. Until then, we’ve got the vivid dreams of Beauty and the Beat.

The Beatles and R&B

It's not news that the Beatles began their recording career heavily indebted to black American music. Early rock and roll, R&B and the blues were all important ingredients of their sound, as Anglicized as it was (the Beatles were probably less shameless in their appropriation of these genres than most of their peers). Anyways, a quick listen to their earlier recordings, or glance at the covers they recorded, reveals that R&B had made an impact in Liverpool.

However, as I've been immersing myself in R&B this past year, I've been surprised by the extent to which the influence was mutual--the Beatles' influence is clearly felt in R&B. Not in cover versions, although legends like Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin all covered Lennon/McCartney tunes during the 1960s.

The Beatles weren't influencing R&B during the early 60's--when they themselves were aping the genre. It was only after the band left behind their early, more insistently rhythmic music that the influence filtered back. It was the studio-based, baroque and psychedelic Beatles--the Beatles of "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Strawberry Fields Forever"--whose music altered American R&B.

It was connecting a couple anecdotes that led me to recognize R&B's embrace of the Beatles. The first was about Otis Redding. In the months before his death, Redding became obsessed with Sgt. Pepper's. He had previously covered the Beatles,* but this was different. He channeled Pepper's psychedelic sounds in writing "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of A Bay"--a song whose pensive beauty resembles "Strawberry Fields Forever." "Dock Of A Bay" was drastically different from anything Redding had previously written. Different enough that Stax was reluctant to release it at all. Otis, of course, knew better: he predicted the song was a number one hit, although he didn't live long enough to see that come true himself.

A couple years later at Stax, Booker T found himself so inspired by Abbey Road that he and the MG's recorded an entire album of Abbey Road covers. They called it McLemore Avenue--where the Stax studio was--and that's the album cover, at the top of the post.

The second anecdote is about Richard Pegue, a Chicago DJ who ran the Nickel and Penny record labels. The wonderful work of Pegue's labels was recently excavated by the Numero Group. In that release's liner notes, it mentions that Pegue's record collection featured lots of British Pop, including several Beatles LPs. The influence is clear on some of the later cuts on the reissue, when Pegue began using colorful production techniques in his R&B.

This was more broadly true of R&B acts. Stevie Wonder--who hit number one with a cover of "We Can Work It Out" in 1970--took the studio-as-instrument and synthesizer to astounding places. These were sounds that the Beatles and producer George Martin helped introduce into the pop vocabulary. Stevie's Motown colleague  Norman Whitfield, in his work with the Temptations and the Undisputed Truth, was transforming R&B into something as psychedelic as anything from Magical Mystery Tour.

By the early 70's studio experimentation had taken firmly taken hold in R&B. So had the album format, as opposed to the barrage of singles. Credit to that goes to Isaac Hayes more than the Beatles. But it's clear that Hayes was listening to the Beatles--he does a ten-minute version of "Something" on the brilliant Isaac Hayes Movement, and his sophisticated arrangements and multipart songs recall Abbey Road's medley.

I don't want to overstate this case. Psychedelic ideas were in the air. The Beatles were a gateway to those sounds for music fans like Richard Pegue, others in the R&B world. But they weren't the only one (Sly & the Family Stone were another crucial gateway group). And the Beatles were hardly the main influence on late 60's and early 70's R&B. That'd be James Brown, who flipped the Fab Four's trajectory on its head and placed all his emphasis on the rhythm.

But it's a story with a nice circularity. That the Beatles, the world's biggest and most revered rock band, were able to inspire a few new sounds in a genre from which they took so much.


*The Beatles, for their part, had shown their admiration by sending limos to pick up Otis and other Stax performers from the airport during a British tour. And--though this seems ridiculous and it's hard to find documentation for this--Wikipedia and other sites report that the Beatles bowed and kissed the ring of Stax guitarist Steve Cropper.