Kenny Dope Life:Styles (Harmless)

Imagine this : Kenny 'Dope' Gonzales and Lil' Louie Vega standing on a stage. Wearing black leather clothes. Swinging their midback-length frizzy hair around whilst hammering heavy metal chords on their Gibson guitars. Consistantly pausing to wave their 'metal' index and little fingers around whilst headbanging and screaming "hellooo New Jersey! Are you ready to rock!!?"

This could have been a Masters At Work concerts, had Kenny Dope focused on Black Sabbath as a source of inspiration when he was 15 and living in Brooklyn's Sunset Park in New York -before he got into hip hop in the 80s. The presence of the seminal 'War pigs' by Ozzy et al. on this Kenny Dope Life:Styles compilation cannot be criticised -we like that songs as much as most metal fans- but where does it fit into the funky and deep house beats tingled with African and Latin instrumentation that has served to bring Masters At Work to world fame?

Short answer : it doesn't and only few of the other tracks on the album do. The overlong discofied funk of BT Express obviously provides a reference point and the Latin connection is intimated through Jayme Marques' Berimbao and Bobby Vince Panuetto's Good Bucks -and of the three, only Berimbao stands out, with its samba meets afrobeat rhythm. The surprising common trait of many LifeStyles entries is guitars and guitar solos in particular -another element that has failed to make a significant entry into the MAW sound.

Most interesting album moment is the kitchy oddity of Gentle Giant's Proclomation, its funk-not-funk sliced with a mechanic 80s reggae pop style that sounds like something fashioned by conservatively and politely rebelling graduated uniformed school pupils in the British countryside -and no, you didn't just hear us comparing it with Kajagoogoo. With an organ sound somewhere between Iron Butterfly and a virus-hit old-school Pacman arcade game, Proclomation gradually grows on you through an endearingly insane but yet understandable weirdness. This may have been a song that Kenny and his friends dropped at parties for a good laugh and camp value.

Jackson 5's I am love is well-chosen and not only because it is one of the few Jackson tracks that relies more on instruments than vocals to drive an infectious transition from smooth classic soul to a funked-up breaks and theme suite. The riff-ridden blues rock and screeching guitar solos in crescendo makes this one a real blockparty rocker -and is one of the few examples of how 80s-style keys and guitars can interact with classic soul without turning the entire song into prefab plastic-fantastic machinepop.

Sathima Bea Benjamin pays hommage to her continent with Africa, a stimulating deep song where Benjamin's vocals soar weightlessly over a simple but perfectly balanced space of bass rounds, sax blows and a very Miles Davis jazz piano. The songs flies effortlessly through it's 8 minutes plus proving once more than less can definetly be more in jazz and soul.

Ellen Mcilwaine has been enjoying a slight revival lately through album reissues and hits the spot here with the cheeky Jimmy Jean, which has acoustic guitars strums and congas underpinned by a rolling improv bassline and Mcilwaine's lively sporadic singing and chanting -very very Joni Mitchell. Phil Upchurch goes into a deep western-cinema style on Blackgold, with surf style jazz guitars, strings and chorus and echo effects that suggest music played in a uhm.. church, oddly enough.

Kenny Dope's Life:Styles has enough good songs to go around and is worth getting just for the Jackson 5, Phil Upchurch and Sathima Bea Benjamin songs. But it is yet another 'back to the roots' album that raises more questions than it answers. The album quells most songs from the mid-70s, so we'd love to see a 'volume two' summing up Kenny Dope's hip hop sources of inspiration through the 80s. Maybe a job for the BBE label?

Review by Nicolai Hartvig

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