Knobody is no better off at trying to save rap than nobody. An upstart on a vet indie imprint well past their moment in the sun (or at least until Del drops a new album), he might as well be Shiner Massive (look 'em up) trying to jumpstart Slash Records from a coma. And his name benefactor, Casual, hasn't been a power in the game since well before Koch ate other indies. Remember Souls of Mischief? '93 til Infinity? Yeah, he rolls with them.


So when this respectable out-of-the-game elder compares his new protégé to none other than Slim Shady, 'Oh, no you didn't' comes to mind. Otherwise Knobody would be (non-Shiner) massive. And yet there is hope. Not that rap needs saving, FYI. But when potentially formidable bomb factories like Lupe Fiasco (to shoot a bit lower) get lumped in with the Little Brother/Talib Kweli crowd when there's so much more thought to "thoughtful" rhyming, it's nice to give the man a little brother. And Tha Clean Up is the best thing Hieroglyphics have dropped in years, so why not call it their shot at Fiascoesque semifame?

There are beats, for one. The shrill cut-up strings of "Supa" is an attention-getting bed for Knobody's flow, a sticky Rubik's cube like Cam'ron that spouts off lines ending in "arguably"/"artistry"/"artery" but hustles minor like a bright disciple of Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star rather than Scarface. "I'm On It" mixes up rock guitars, Neptunes-style drum clicks and squeaky synths, but name-checks hyphy, a scene the music doesn't evoke at all, and none of the modifiers I just ran off are applicable to the old Hieroglyphics production model either, for that matter.

It turns out to be prescient, though, as the second half eschews the Fiasco/strings model for the synth-driven thump of actual hyphy. But Knobody talks about "intelligence" and "self-discipline," which don't go hand in hand with the weed-slugging, car-bouncing glint of the Yay Area scene at all. "Instead of traumatize, I'd rather teach the children/ But I don't got the knowledge myself," answers "Menace," titled as such because presumably Knobody knows he's a pain in the ass of hiphop's class-conscious machinations, where even the lone superstar of backpackers Kanye West started citing clothing labels as inspiration once he hit it big.

So the lyrics are delusional in the way you want good rappers to be, convinced of their success to the very last recoupable. "If it ain't my time to shine, you watchin' the wrong clock," says the man who won't settle for a flash in the pan. That's what we hope.