Mike Ladd
Welcome to the Afterfuture
Ozone
Deezam! If this is the afterfuture, exhume H.G. Wells and have him construct his time machine, because it’s time to hit ludicrous speed, kids. Parts Dr. Octagon, parts unknown, Mike Ladd whisks us away from the ever-present downfall of society into an everlasting video game filled with smoky beats, warped sounds and spoken-word rantings culled from anger, paranoia and hysteria. The vocoder is throttled on the dark and eloquent “Planet 10,” while “Bladerunners,” featuring the equally talented Company Flow, spews forth intelligent and abstract lyrics courtesy of Flow’s El-Producto.
Strings and samples coincide with Ladd’s lyrics like swirled yogurt. You can tell this brother read up on pop culture and mathematics simultaneously. Rhymes like “I wish I was a mechanic who was bipolar… still fixin’ souls/like an engineer for Chrysler who spends his time with Volvos.” Ask Jay-Z to battle that and he’s likely to drop a bomb in his Versace drawls and all over his Rolls Royce. Coincidentally, Ladd hails from Cambridge, Massachusetts, of all places. But as he points out in the liner notes, “I’m from Cambridge, Mass. and I didn’t go to Harvard murafuckin’ neither.” If he continues to drop science like this, he should consider teaching there.
