Handsome devils

The Prince and the Automator

by Alex Pappademas

Victor D. Lavalle's short story "Getting Ugly" begins with the narrator sighing, "For years I hoped I'd become a beautiful man, but by twenty-five it seemed the shit was not to be." It's a sentiment De La Soul compatriot, dysfunctional-rap godfather, and American composer Paul "Prince Paul" Huston could probably relate to. In 1996, fed up with (and bummed out by, and burned out on) a rap industry that had perennially undervalued him, Paul made tracks for the underground (in both the musical and the contractual sense) with Psychoanalysis: What Is It?, an album of black-comic black comedy issued by the Crooklyn dubmeisters at WordSound Records.

Programmed to grate on hip-hop's well-documented inability to take a joke, as mournful in its satire (on repeated listens) as Richard Pryor, Paul's so-long-suckas booty-skit anti-career move should have been the first chapter of his "Where Are They Now" segment. Instead, the album got re-released on Tommy Boy, became a critical fave when Biggie and Puff were peaking and rap was ripe to be clowned, and won Paul a deal for Prince Among Thieves (Tommy Boy), a hip-hoperatic "solo" album with a double-digit cast of guest MCs that's currently in development as a Chris Rock-financed film (though its young-rapper-seduced-and-betrayed-by-thug-life saga seems more natch for Broadway).

Handsome Boy Modeling School's So . . . How's Your Girl is Paul's second 1999 album, a collaboration with Kool Keith's estranged enabler Dan "The Automator" Nakamura and a veritable Love Boat load of celebrity guests. The band name, like a few of the sampled skits, comes from a classic Get a Life episode: you could probably elucidate the whole concept as a critique of rap/R&B's pervasive looks-ism, except that if Paul and the Automator competed with anybody on the rap charts it'd be Juvenile and Jay-Z -- neither of whom is exactly Billy Dee Williams -- instead of Tyrese and Montell Jordan. Like Get a Life's courageously grotesque Chris Elliott, they're really just spoofing their own un-Details-ness.

So . . . How's Your Girl is nowhere near as sharp as Thieves, which cross-fades warmth and mercilessness so brilliantly that it's edged out Peanut Butter Wolf's butta My Vinyl Weighs a Ton as my favorite '99 album. But Paul (billed here as "Chest Rockwell") and Nakamura ("Nathaniel Meriwether") make their new-model army strut the catwalk like nobody's biz. The intro cackles "Rock and roll could never ever hip-hop like this!" behind breaks that usher Paul's old band Stetsasonic into the Blue Öyster Cult. And that's pretty much how the album goes, if "hip-hop" as a verb can mean sampling new rap language from Popular Science (like Miho Hatori on "Metaphysical") or torching a stack of James Brown-manqué '45s in a turntablist grease fire (like DJ Shadow and DJ Quest on "Holy Calamity") or rummaging through Fred Sanford's store with the ghost of Augustus Pablo (like Del the Funky Homosapien and Dave from De La Soul on The PJs).

Forget rock and roll -- hip-hop seldom hip-hops like this. And with all due respect to the consistently slept-upon Automator, whose beats are spookier and trickier than Spooky's or Tricky's, this rock rolls thanks chiefly to Chest Rockwell.

Paul's my hero. From the way his skits put De La Soul atop the $83 pyramid on their Three Feet High and Rising to the crimelord on Prince Among Thieves who specializes in heroin, prostitution, gun running, and "rap management," he's given us ample cause to name-drop him from the rooftops. No producer reaches farther out for raw materials: Paul's equal-opportunity vision embraces typing-test records, Johnny Cash, and Serge Gainsbourg, and Handsome Boy scroll from Three Dog Night to the Three Little Pigs. But the introduction to hip-hop of the dramatic vignette (paving the way for every "interlude" where DMX talks to Satan) and all the stoopid-fresh non sequiturs he's flipped are ultimately secondary manifestations of Paul's brilliance.

An underground super-producer like DJ Premier forces MCs to step up their lyrical content to match his crystalline, utterly no-nonsensical beats. Paul's kind of the anti-Premier: by giving his collaborators goofy characters to play (Big Daddy Kane, as Count Mackula!) and projecting the premise that his art's just slapstick, he tricks his collaborators into flowing freer and flyer than they ever have. I'm assuming Brian Eno was after the same headspace with his "oblique strategies" (he'd give his musicians instructions like "Pretend you're a gila monster" when he laid a track), but I've never sat through Music for Airports long enough to confirm. Eno's obliques just won't do the freak, and if that's what you're looking for -- to paraphrase Rick Pitino's memorable U-Mass endorsement -- it's a no-brainer which school you're gonna go to.