producers: karma infinite, tradition

7. Know Pain, Know Glory

A writer writes best about what he knows. This old truth will be given to you by every creative writing teacher. And while we all know that George Lucas couldn't know about Skywalkers, the plots and contents of his stories are still about topics that are true to him: love, betrayal, fear, etc., etc. Enter Tradition. He calls his album "Supervillain" (actually he calls it "Supervillian"), and he tries to position himself as that person. But he is no 'super villain', at least not the way he portrays this character on the album. Sure hip hop is always about above life egos, but even there the fine tuned characters sound the best. Hence the biggest hindrance this album is facing makes it sound like a small kid playing super hero, that changes the rules of the game as he goes along. Instead of describing and defining the person he wants to portray, before he appears as such. Like a Lucas would have done.

And if you take all this into consideration, then it's no surprise that the best cut on here is "SMC", a cut where Tradition is dissing other emcees. This is the best cut because here he talks about something he knows in believable ways. And here he even spits memorable lines like: "hey yo bitch, let me know / is your flow clear playdough / I don't understand you at all / you ain't got no spine, why you try to stand tall". If you read this quote, you'll also be able to tell that Tradition has a 'special' flow, that boarders a simple sing along style. It is still very much talking though and it's breaking the lines in random rhyming patterns. That actually comes across okay, if it weren't for his voice, that is not naturally hard, and doesn't account to the most threatening villain not being of the aggressive, but of the calm type. However, the flow sounds nice on the inventing a new world "Genetic Strand", what however is also very much to the rather cool beat, that enhances our impression we get from the lyrics.

And speaking of beats, they are all done by Tradition and Karma Infinite, a fellow ex-Alliance crew member. And we have already reviewed a couple of his efforts, hence it's always interesting to see, what he's doing now. Well, after the last one (the FX album) featuring a ton of already used samples, he's reducing that to a minimum here. You still get the Star Wars tune on "Imperial Marching", that mainly suffers from the rappers failing to fully connect with the beat. What however could also be due to the horns taking too much of a center stage, and the elements being rather strangely chopped up, if at all. Here a 'boring' loop-chorus-loop-chorus structure would have helped the cut a lot (instead of just adding a bass and drum to the original version of the song). "Now Bow Down" is again opting for a sample (or beat) that we have heard before, what here works very well. Tradition even connects with the beat, and like on other tracks, we are also getting cool scratches. Now another pleasant surprise when it comes to the beats can be found on "King Of The Earth", that has a pretty cool old school vibe. We are however not totally sure that it's not straight jacked from someone else. But this is cool. So is the previously mentioned "Genetic Strand", that has a nifty bleep effect.

As for the rest on this album, "Get Live" and "Brainsick" work in a really bare kind of way, the epic style of "Know Pain, Know Glory" or "Supreme Beings" (feat. Koyotte) is okay, with the latter's chorus being rather wack though. "Crackman On Speedball" is again working in a simple kind of way, despite it even featuring a detail in the back. And then, there's also "Sept. 11, 2001". That is a surprisingly happy beat that's combined with voice samples from Bush. And here you are getting all his war monger, his un-presidential rhetoric, as well as his call for murder (as a death sentence without a prior trial is murder). This will either have your patriotic breast swell in pride, or if you are someone that can look behind what is actually being said, you'll be angered about all the ignorance and arrogance that is coming across on every single word.

But back to the review: first of all we'd actually want to hear this in a better sound quality, to hear the beats in a clearer kind of way. Because Karma corrected a couple of errors that he used to do, while we still got to wonder how much of the good stuff was not just borrowed from someone else. As for Tradition, we can only say that he has a confidence behind the mic, that should enable him to be spitting good rhymes. However rhymes that talk about things where he doesn't have to stretch himself into a fantasy world where he quickly faces a problem of describing something he doesn't know. But his rhymes do contain a certain comic charm.