Word: everlasting
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...Everlast (born Erik Schrody) is already well known as the writer of the Santana hit Put Your Lights On. Hip-hop followers probably remember him from the 1990s as the frontman of the proudly uncouth, roughneck trio House of Pain. After four years with that group, he quit, dropped out of music, changed gears and then scored a surprise hit with his 1998 solo debut, Whitey Ford Sings the Blues. That record broke all the rules, using acoustic guitars, rapping, blues riffs and elements borrowed from Johnny Cash and Neil Young to create a striking hip-hop offshoot that sounded...
...Whitey's, Everlast works the same musical vein but makes the focus of his storytelling almost exclusively the rush of feelings that coursed through him as he recovered from surgery--his own postcards from the edge. On I Can't Move, he tells how a part of him flirted with death, almost welcoming it: "Want to get near it, close enough to fear it, close enough to hear it," he sings. In the marvelous, bouncing Babylon Feeling, he regrets that his own obsession with materialism may have led him straight to a hospital bed: "My heart is broke, my will...
...Everlast is careful to say his experience gave him new directions and new questions, not the sudden clarity that has become a pop-culture cliche. "I'm not saying I have all the answers," he says. "I made this record to help me understand what happened. Some of the changes I went through haven't defined themselves...
...least not without a good shoot-out at the end. A purist mentality kept the genre loaded down with hard-core rappers, most of whom stuck with traditional formulas: shunning live instruments and embracing gangsta bravado. "I love hip-hop, so what I do is done with respect," says Everlast, "but there was a very closed-minded attitude toward live instruments and music that wasn't hard core. I wanted to get out of that...
...that is just what he's done. Although Eminem's sensationalist rapping still rides high on the charts, that old consensus may at last be showing signs of breaking down. In searching for a little meaning in his own heart, Everlast may have touched on something that will make hip-hop reconsider...