I’ve heard some very fine oxymorons: honest politician, paid volunteer, El Camino Classic. But few can equal “Vermont hip-hop.”
Perhaps it’s simply that maple-drenched rural life punctuated by blizzards doesn’t really tend to appear often as a subject for rapping when gangstas cover much flashier and sexier material bred of warmer climates. Besides, there isn’t much that rhymes with maple. (Skiing, admittedly, offers more possibilities.)
It is, therefore, a wonderful and ear-opening experience to cue up the work of Saxtons River’s Rhythm Ruckus, the finest thing to hit Vermont hip-hop since, well, Rhythm Ruckus. Make no mistake about it: despite whatever expectations listeners bring to the unlikely duo, Dr. Caucasian and Scribe1 make infectious, clever and highly entertaining hip-hop that holds its own against the finest efforts in the genre.
The pair seem to revel in the juxtaposition of matters rural and urban, in the unexpected manifestations of urban problems that show up even in the Green Mountains. In “Baltimore Meth,” they talk about seeing the cops on I-91 busting suspicious drivers, wondering where they’re headed. The sample they rap over is an unusual choice: Randy Newman’s quietly moody “Baltimore,” complete with the refrain, “Beat-up little seagull/ on a marble stair/ tryin’ to find the ocean/ lookin’ everywhere.”
Other Rhythm Ruckus tunes mine surprising ends of the aesthetic chart, all the while maintaining some intensely clever titles and lines. “A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances” sounds as chipper as a hit from an obscure musical, while the lyrics offer well-turned wordplay in nonstop rapid fire. It’s sometimes hard to catch every word, but the closer you listen, the more gems like “cookin’ up a viscous punch” jump out of the flow.
In “Sons of the Hills,” Rhythm Ruckus turns to another brand of hip-hop that’s not commonplace, looping a slow-moving, bluesy acoustic guitar part accompanied by hand claps and lazy drums. On top of it, Doc C and Scribe1 engage in heavy duty wordplay about such druggy topics as synaesthesia.
The duo’s sense of song construction offers a pleasant kind of movement as well. Tunes are seldom too long—if things seem to drag a bit, chances are you’re in store for an unusual sample to change the feel, or an abrupt ending. Taken as a whole, a set of their tunes is likely to indulge a surprisingly wide array of sounds. Acoustic instrumentation bumps up against synthesized chords, and movie dialogue collides with string sections. It makes for hip-hop that is, in the best sense, hard to pin down. It’s tempting to draw lines to other performers with such playful sensibilities—Jurassic 5, The Beastie Boys, even Beck—but to merely triangulate the pair’s sound is too limiting. Rhythm Ruckus is busy establishing an all-encompassing brand of hip-hop, free of the contraints of expectations fostered by musicians who exist solely in an urban context. The music still has plenty of explicit references to sex, violence and drugs. But along with those hip-hop regulars, you’ll find a particularly grooving examination of what it’s like to live a socially conscious, hip-hop fuelled life connected to the concerns of the urban mainstream, but living well out of it.
The laid-back and bucolic culture in the mountains to the north may seem like an unlikely source of compelling hip-hop, but Rhythm Ruckus is certainly that. They’ve been out of circulation for a while, but recently, the duo appeared live for the first time in a year, laying down the rhymes in the kind of location that would seem a strange spot for hip-hop anywhere except the Green Mountain State: Brattleboro’s Stone Church.
Both Doc C and Scribe1 have produced solo work, and Doc C’s latest, Fuckin’ Try Me II: Escape from Paradise, is due out this summer via free download. You can find solo material and Rhythm Ruckus tunes at ruckusnet.com. Whatever you call the sound these two are creating—they refer to it sometimes as “Vermont Homegrown”—it’s a local original that’s well worth praise, and well worth giving your full attention—it looks like a new force in hip-hop is brewing in the wilds out beyond all those cheddar shops and sugar houses.
