Every MC is the greatest. Every MC spits flames, fires lyrical bullets and bench presses rhymes. Few MC's can back up their braggadocio: 50 Cent is mired in lyrically weak club tracks, Jay-Z is too self-obsessed (ditto for Kanye) Nas is too indulgent and every other great rapper nobody's heard of, so it's hard to debate their greatness. Dot-TEN shows promise. Now if he can just get people to hear him.
MegaWatt v1.5 is part full-length part teaser. At barely 30 minutes and nine tracks long it serves as a good introduction to Dot-TEN's style. With a manifesto decrying the era of of "bling bling, gangsters, and thug appeal," Dot-TEN and Def Fidelity Records are on a noble, yet somewhat perplexing mission to "push a new movement, the next level in street hop." This is quixotic because Dot-TEN is not a national rapper, so his main audience is Twin Citians. And if you've ever been to a local rap show in the Twin Cities it's obvious that the white kids with backpacks and iPods playing Heiruspecs hardly need converting to the pursuit of anti-gansterdom. This is the land of 10,000 white rappers and they are all preaching anti-bling. So while Dot-TEN may not be the first to sermonize it, he at least brings some colored Northside pride to the table.
One problem with Dot-TEN's "next level" credo is that he assumes he's the first to combine "cutting edge futuristic sound," with a hip-hop golden age aesthetic. Company Flow did this years ago, and Dot-TEN's beats, as forward thinking as he believes them to be, are El-P-light productions. The difference being that while the other indie-rappers are quoting Marvel Comics and Adult Swim, Dot-TEN is still bumping Gang Starr and EPMD like its 1992. It's both refreshing and digressing. |
