Album: MC Honky

I am the Messiah, B-Unique

This is worth it for the back-sleeve cartoon alone – a clearly unimpressed punter reading Spun magazine's "White Rap Issue", the cover star of which is the balding, bespectacled, bow-tied, pipe-smoking MC Honky; from the magazine's pages emanates a speech bubble containing just the words: "Bitch, Grumble, Whine". An image that tells you everything you need to know about the cliquish exclusivity of American music demographics, divisions over which MC Honky tramples with glorious abandon on this enjoyably absurd bout of sample-collaging. Honky truly knows no borders, and refuses to take things seriously – one moment, he's laying a funky organ and horn groove, like something on Beck's Midnite Vultures, behind cut-up samples of a Shakespearean sonnet; the next, he's decorating excerpts from oily self-help records with harp and string samples: "You are a wonderful person... a shining star... you are very sexy... you always remember my birthday, thank you." The prankster behind this gloriously silly, eminently enjoyable project is E from Eels, hanging out with a sampler, a couple of top-flight drummers (Joey Waronker and E's bandmate Butch) and some local buddies, with no brief to follow and no deadline to meet. Which turns out to be a good way to come up with some decent (and varied) music, ranging from the scratchy antique 78rpm vocal given a fresh string arrangement, like a resuscitated ghost, in "Only a Rose", to the brazen one-upmanship of "3 Turntables & 2 Microphones", in which our hero takes on Beck in the honky equivalent of hip-hop battles. Should music be this much dumb fun? Your call...