"Your budget on my neck," brags Cam'Ron on the latest installment of an increasingly diverse and promising line of output from producer Alex Kresovich. The project is Gold N' Fly: 007, which uses the music from Goldeneye 64 -- arguably the best video game ever -- to remix hip-hop acts that are probably more popular than they deserve to be. Cam's line is funny considering the budget for the project was probably not much higher than $0, but as such its presence here is a bold statement, even if unintentional, on the ever growing accessibility of the music industry and the blurring line between amateur and professional (and which is also starting to become a recurring theme of this blog).
And thank G to the D, or else we'd never have gems like Gold N' Fly knocking at our front door. With this collection of innovative tracks, Alex reaffirms his breadth of skill as a sample-based producer and his penchant for tackling challenges of thematic creativity. I guess the ultimate litmus test for any kind of narrow-focus concept art is, does the audience actually enjoy it? In this case, it's hardly a question. Even if you've never heard of Goldeneye 64, Nintendo, or James Bond, you'll be hard pressed not to get a kick of head-bobbing pleasure out of the stuff here. For those of us who've spent countless hours of our youth (and, uh, in times more recently than we'd like to admit) huddled in basements with friends in front of the namesake video game, the music will assume a dimension of nostalgia, and remind us that those were hours well spent.
Some listeners might find it to be too much to digest all at once. A few of the tracks err on the side of drawn-out or repetitive, but die-hards will appreciate the proof that the hip-hop epic is still alive, somewhere. That being said, nobody will disagree that the 22-track, 70-plus-minute album could have stood to have some of the fat trimmed. Luckily, though the whole may not outweigh the sum of the parts, the parts themselves will assuredly shine in countless other contexts; e.g., I see deep and rich fodder for "best-of-my-fave-rapper" playlists for years to come. There are miles of trunk-thumping jams for cruising around town with your brahs next Friday, and plenty of partytime essentials. Though Alex's multi-angle stylistic assault can be overload for newcomers, after a few listens you'll start to appreciate the colorful patchwork; it warrants repeating that, at the very least, there will be something for everyone here.
Once you get down with the producer's modus operandi, you'll have trouble denying or resisting his musical allure. Alex has always had an uncanny grasp on tone and flow, particularly as it relates to aligning that of a given rapper's with that of his beats, and the tracks here evidence definite growth in this vein. Lil Wayne's "Fireman" is handled particularly deftly, the beat accentuating and augmenting the dramatic slowburn of the original track. Obie Trice's "Cry Now" channels raw energy, and Cam'Ron's "Get 'Em Girls" finds a brooding, subterranean beat that rivals the original. I can't pick out a clear standout track -- but I can say that the album's first lyrical track (its second actual track; Alex's albums necessarily have "intros" and "outros," a drama-heightening gimmick that will most likely summon the skip button, but which I suppose is standard in hip-hop), Tech-N9ne's "Everybody Move", might be the most memorable. It blows the door down with its singeing, relentless jabs of snare-y percussion and guitar distortion, while the rapper's tongue-twisting lyrical onslaught sets the stage for the rest of the album.
To dip back into the theoretical, Gold N' Fly really ends up as both an homage to each of the gun-toting, rim-riding, drug-hustling, money-flaunting, woman-disrespecting mainstream rappers who made the cut and a play on them. For all of their countless boasts of cash, cars, and other tokens of wealth, they're humbled by a bedroom producer fucking with some video game samples. Fucking with video game samples to create songs on par with their originals, might I add. Thankfully, we're no longer living in a society that would have punished such abandon for class disparity with gruesome execution, but instead in one where communicative and electronic advances have enabled such indulgences and facilitated their widespread distribution. So download Gold N' Fly: 007, and support the advances the last 7000 or so years of human civilization have brought us!
Download fo' free HERE: www.GoldNFly.com
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