Pitchfork

There's always been internal personality conflicts in hip-hop, especially when an aspiring MC gets his lyrical technique down and wants to use it to express who he is-- or who he wants people to see him as. It's how you get the battle-rap/lover-man dichotomy of vintage LL Cool J, the pseudo-bipolar lighthearted sociopathy of Eminem, and David Banner's pop-that-pussy-and-educate-yourself agenda. Los Angeles rapper Blu, meanwhile, has a split personality of his own, one that emerges on his semi-pseudonymous Johnson&Jonson collaboration project with producer Mainframe, and it's one that many hip-hop fans see in themselves: the split between being a smart-ass kid and a grown-ass man.

Johnson&Jonson-- much like his standout debut, the Exile-produced Below the Heavens-- finds Blu's lyrics filled with invocations of youthful indiscretion and coming-of-age epiphanies, some sounding like decade-old memories and others coming across like they happened last week. This is where the smart-ass kid comes in-- joking about drinking gin at age 10 on opener "J&J", recalling classroom put-downs of Michael Jackson and proper usage of the word "bitch" on the two-part "Up All Night", catching a contact buzz off his father's blunts and aspiring towards his friends' Menace to Society status in the process of ignoring his mom's warnings in "Mama Told Me"-- and rapping like a young-and-hungry shit-talker with something to prove on just about every track. It's not unfamiliar turf, but it's put together and delivered from the perspective of an older, wiser man who still has some lingering affection for his young-and-ignorant days, some of which might not entirely be behind him.

While the liquor-and-weed vibe and frequent pimp-hand proclamations give Johnson&Jonson its freewheeling vibe of fun-seeking, youthful arrogance, there's moments where it comes across like grinning admissions of benign, remorseless guilt-- not self-absorbed or defensive, but with an undercurrent of relief that he somehow escaped fucking things up for himself. It's mostly implicit (if not absent) in the party/battle cuts; if there's any grown-up sentiment in "Half a Knot"'s euphoric swagger or the disco-fied Hollywood swingin' of "Wow", it's mostly in the feeling that comes with showing up on your old block with more money and skills than you left it with, or the freedom of being able to play the part of a bar-hopping high-roller without worrying about getting caught with a fake ID. But this album was recorded in 2006 when Blu was 23, which is a good age to take stock of what you've done so far and where you're going from there, and here's where the grown-ass man aspect takes hold.

"Another joint lit without a brother I can pass it to/ Another black suit I gotta buy, and I've had two," he laments on the Lennon-sampling hidden track "Hold on John", an inventory of personal and political strife which feels like a strung-together series of realizations that you can't really go back to being an escapism-obsessed kid so easily. It's a sentiment backed up in the mournful homecoming of "Long Time Gone", with its wistful Hugh Masekela-fueled vibe and its lyrics reminiscing over a permanently irretrievable childhood. And he sounds like he's struggling against his (and others') old habits on "The Only Way", where he waxes frustrated over early 70s soul and admits that he's "a little better by stayin' humble/ I still hear my grandpa mumble, 'stay out of trouble, boy'".

All that personality, and the record sounds amazing, too. A lot of it has to do with how well Blu meshes with some unpredictable, frequently left-field beats: Mainframe's production style reveals him to be one of 2008's biggest out-of-nowhere surprises, and he delivers a dizzying conglomeration of rock, classic soul, and funk that provides some of the most densely packed and restless sonics of any rap record in 2008. The beats on Johnson&Jonson are the most psychedelic since Edan's Beauty and the Beat-- only they go beyond acid-fried weirdness into all-out party-rocking breakbeat psychosis that had me thinking vintage Prince Paul with an even weirder record collection.

And while Blu's insights are deep, his mic control's deeper, and if the heavier meaning of this album eludes you the energetic power of his voice won't. He delivers some jewels, flashy when he needs to be and agile at a whole bunch of different tempos, yet still down-to-earth enough to make sure his words are in the service of messages that area clear and relatable. With the best of two worlds-- the supreme comedic cockiness of the youngster and the insight of a lyrical vet who's already grown up fast since he first started rhyming-- Blu should have the underground on lock for a long time to come.