Review Hip Hop

Mike Ladd

Welcome To The Afterfuture

Va Va • 2015

Thanks to Va Va Records, Mike Ladd’s »Welcome To The Afterfuture«, his second record from the year 2000, is finally available on vinyl. It shows all the facets in which the Boston born musicians has developed his versatile skills: Mike Ladd used to play bass and drums in garage bands, while his poetic talents were rewarded through publications in books and magazines. Even jazzy approaches, which have pressed to the outsides more and more recently, have always been inherent to his works. The record from 2000 is a shiny marker within all the hiphop-releases that have pushed the genre into new directions around the turn of the millennium. It’s little surprising that Company Flow are the record’s only featurers, as is the fact that the album was originally released by Ozone, the label that also released Anti-Pop Consortium. »Welcome To The Afterfuture« is a discursive, critical look into the past and the future, kept together by electronic lo-fi-gimicking, always crossed by rock-attitudes, afrobeats, souly and sountrack-like risks. You can see the funk dripping from every pore, even when the whole thing is about to take off into space. Don’t get me wrong: This is no threat, rather a promise, also being kept through its lyrics. For every song, Mike Ladd has come up with his very own approach and way of expression. His chain-smoker’s raps are as understanding as they are far-sighted and always right on the spot, which contradictorily means that some tracks do just fine without any lyrics, at all. All in all, he shows us how to greet the end of the world while dancing and without hanging our heads low. Put differently, using the first few words from the last track »Feb. 4 ‘99 (For All Those Killed by Cops)«, a stunning spoken-word-revelation: »It’s all confused and beautiful.«

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