To say that chi-town-born rapper Primo The Cinematic is of the Kanye West Chicago hip hop-scene ilk would just be plain wrong. Primo’s ambitious double-CD debut, Contemporary Classic is a nod to the golden era of rap when it was less about appealing to the mainstream and more about survival and the search for identity through eclectic sampling, experimental sounds and stream of consciousness witticisms (of which Primo has plenty). A more accurate ancestry for Primo would be Erik B. and Rakim, or Run DMC. His rhymes are autobiographical collages, looking both inward and out at the world around him, but always through his own lens.
Contemporary Classic plays out like a sequential series of movie scenes; where the opener is entitled “The Invitation,” and the players in this collage of songs remind the listener towards the end of the first volume that there is more to come with “To Be Continued…” The songs, for the most part, contain jazz piano riffs and sometimes a saxophone or a trumpet lick sample, while Primo goes to work with his word-smithing wit. Songs like “Just Breezin’” with its 70s R&B samplings are reminiscent of Will Smith’s “Getting Jiggy With It,” and stand out as radio-play potentials with its 70s lounge-funk back-beat and care-free groove, accompanied by Primo’s quick-rap poetry: ‘Coastin over oceans and everlastin sky. Like time, I’m just passin by’. Unlike many rappers who tend to “eat” their lyrics up while they are rapping, simultaneously losing the listeners (who only then have the beats to latch onto), Primo goes to great lengths to enunciate his words so listeners can get it. Another standout track is “Sum Ol’ Slick Sh*t,” a 4-minute song about the rapper and his posse, conveying his unique persona as an artist unlike those other rappers: ‘I’ll make sure you remember me. I’m everything you kids you wish to pretend to be’.
Although Primo’s debut has many bright spots, there were times when some of the songs could have used some bridges to break up the monotony of the raps. On Vol. II, the song “Swagger,” had such a strong blues feel to it that at times, you were hoping for it to diverge into some blues-riffed bridge. Adding these touches could have helped break some of the tempo-monotony throughout the album.
For such an ambitious effort, Primo had more than a little help from his “musical family” known as The Embassy Click. He feels that since the golden era of rap, between the mid-80s and early 90s when rap and hip-hop was still untainted by mainstream commercialism; somewhere along the way, “the love and respect of the art has been lost.” Contemporary Classic attempts and suceeds to recapture that golden era through lyrical wit and rootsy-record-scratchin rap that your parents grew up on.
Reviewed By Michael Morgan
