HANDSOME BOY MODELING SCHOOL
White People
Atlantic/Elektra
· The second CD from eclectic hip-hop production duo draws the map from Hall and Oates to the Mars Volta, with plenty of side trips.
With White People, Handsome Boy Modeling School let us in on the joke – they aren’t that funny. Is it too meta to interpret the skits featuring Father Guido Sarducci and Tim Meadows’ Ladies Man – two distinctly unfunny Saturday Night Live mainstays – between the otherwise excellent tracks on this album as a signal that Dan The Automator and Prince Paul find the concept of Handsome Boy Modeling School more interesting than its package?
Like DJ Shadow’s first U.N.K.L.E. disc or 4AD’s This Mortal Coil project, Handsome Boy set their guests in nearly elemental form or present them in wildly different contexts. So De La Soul are heard on "If It Wasn’t For You" as if nothing happened after 3 Feet High And Rising and "Breakdown" could be any Jack Johnson tune, aside from percolating effects that distinguish it from his usual fare. Hearing Cat Power as a wounded chanteuse isn’t a leap, but peppering "I’ve Been Thinking" with old-school lingo and scratching from Canadian Kid Koala show her in a different light. It comes together on "Rock And Roll (Could Never Hip Hop Like This) Part 2," which suggests that all of this cross-pollination and offbeat sonic sourcing grew out of the crate-digging tendencies that fuelled early hip hop.
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