What Is the Soundtrack for Urban Renewal?

DaVinci - "What You Finna Do" (Music Video) from Sweetbreads Creative Collective on Vimeo.

I was just about to condemn Davinci to the internet buzz cycle. This video is a well-filmed little slice of Bay Area life in noir et blanche, but the track was very bland to me. Very low-key, with some thoughtful dialogue interspersed with hustle raps. It's pretty insane how fast this dude moved from anonymous rapper dude 3 days ago to having Noz post this video up on Cocaine Blunts and having BlvdSt.com and Maurice Garland, among others, cosigning the fuck outta him. I honestly was skeptical, but shit. This. Album. Goes. Hard.

A couple posts ago I wrote up about "Southern reality rap" as a new thematic movement in rap coming up in 2010. However, I think dropping the "Southern" out of it might be a good idea, if Davinci (and Lil B, though his reality is not a reality being experience by anyone except Martians) are any indication. The Day the Turf Stood Still is a GREAT example of "reality rap", and it's also unlike any rap album I've heard in some time. Beatwise, the album sounds like a hybrid of well-worn East Coast soul sample beats and thumping Bay Area slaps. Like I wrote in the reality rap post, the producers behind this album seemed to have worked pretty closely with Davinci, creating an album where the lyrics, voice, and beat have a deep and complex interplay, to the point it's hard to imagine another rapper working as well as Davinci does over these instrumentals.

The real draw, and something I haven't heard in a minute from the Bay Area, is a completely different style lyricist and MC that Davinci embodies. While E-40 continues to do his thing, Lil B spins further into the collective Internet consciousness, and the Livewire gang makes us all remember what it means to be an 80s baby, Davinci is drawing from truly gritty East Coast and Southern styles, but filtering it through his life in a rapidly-gentrifying Bay Area. The last 5 or 6 years in rap since the hyphy movement exploded and then the whole scene had it's post-thizz comedown, it seems like most critics have either lauded (or written off) the entire region as "weird", and dudes like E-40 and Lil B have more or less supported that notion. What has been totally missed in all that is that it's still ground zero for a lot of class and political struggle, as well as everyday struggle for people there. Davinci is a gifted MC: crafting an album full of verses like

The corner up the street used to be the spot/
till they replaced all the liquor stores with coffee shops/
I ain't sayin' it's a bad thing/
but where am I supposed to hustle at?

and not sound like a PHd candidate masking as a street corner hustler is not easy, but he manages. Davinci wants to show you this street scene all around him in the Bay Area, and he films it in IMAX with his words.

Don't say I didn't tell you: REALITY RAP IS THE MOVEMENT IN 2010!

Below is the link for The Day the Turf Stood Still, which you can download for free or buy.

Davinci- The Day the Turf Stood Still