Album: MC Paul Barman

Paullelujah!,

Before Eminem altered everything, the most prominent white contributors to hip hop were all Jewish – smart-ass, artsy middle-class kids such as 3rd Bass and The Beastie Boys, fired up more by the genre's verbal-juggling possibilities than its streetwise attitude or socio-political significance.

MC Paul Barman is the latest addition to their ranks, a cartoonist and illustrator by trade whose debut album reveals a playful, literate sensibility that's both lewd and ludic. "I'm advancing the artform/ Depantsing a fart storm... I'm the ne plus ultra of B+ culture," he claims in "Excuse You", promising to "bombard you with retardulous wordplay" involving "acrostics, narratives, Fibonacci challenge poems, declarative palindromes, manifestos". And so he does, taking full advantage of rap's linguistic latitude to pile puns on top of palindromes – I particularly enjoyed the linked ones "Ha! I ram Mariah a lot, Tom Mottola" – and sprinkle his rhymes with mentions of Jeff Koons, John Cage, Noam Chomsky and Jean Dubuffet. There's even a prize offered for the listener who spots the most palindromes, an offer Jay-Z has yet to match.

The backing tracks are constructed by such as Prince Paul and Dan the Automator's chum MikeTheMusicGuy from scraps and scratches of classical and MOR music and sundry cartoon boings and twangs. The result marks a return to the Daisy Age wordplay fun of 3 Feet High and Rising and Paul's Boutique, a stream of twisted consciousness that touches on serious issues such as the failure of the American education system ("Allow me to leave an illusion dispelled/ 98 per cent of the graduates matriculate because it doesn't count the kids expelled"), but prefers to tickle uptight PC attitudes about race and sex with a hyperbolic comic obscenity akin to South Park. Even then, Barman can't resist the urge to brandish his learning, proclaiming his ludicrously rude "Cock Mobster" – basically, a string of elaborate euphemisms for different film stars' genitals – to be "a pornucopia, a cornucopia of warm fallopia". What a well-bred young fellow!

At the heart of Paullelujah!, though, there's a deep respect for the hard-earned liberal freedoms that enable Barman to work his way, and a knowledge of his own artistic roots that goes back beyond Run DMC, to the beatnik jazz/ poetry musings of Kerouac and Ken Nordine, and the jokey talking-blues of the young Bob Dylan. Indeed, "Talking Time Travel", a sly parody of Dylan's "Talkin' World War III Blues", has the rapper "travel back to a different time/ When people besides rappers enjoyed the rhyme". It's a useful hip-hop history lesson about a form that (to follow Barman's palindromic manner) is driven by so many dynamos.