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| If you want our opinion – and you’re getting it, pal, whether you want it or not – there are just not enough science-fiction-themed concept hip-hop albums by white, female rappers. Princess Superstar’s fifth album (the first since 2001’s brilliant Princess Superstar Is) aims to plug this gaping hole in the market. |
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My Machine is a concept album in the old-fashioned sense of the word, in that it’s actually based around a narrative structure. It’s far too complicated to go into here, but to cut a long story short, the whole shebang is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which Princess Superstar, bored of being a ‘nobody’ and selling no records, has cunningly taken over the world with an army of clones of herself, with the result that she is the only celebrity left on the planet.
It’s a witty, satirical take on the rampant egomania of several of today’s happening young ‘urban’ artists, and – in a musical climate where Mike Skinner can release a record babbling on interminably about kebabs and the bloody Guardian behaves as if he’s reconstructed a hitherto lost Shakespearean tragedy – impressively high-concept. The musical scope is fairly wide-ranging as well, notably on songs such as ‘Sex, Drugs and Drugs’, which display more of an ‘electro’ bent than was previously evident in Princess Superstar’s more markedly old-skool hip-hop. The lyrics are once more bang-on, too, with her trademark delivery, simultaneously laconic and vitriolic: ‘10,000 Hits’ begins with a sample from earlier minor success ‘Bad Babysitter’, before Superstar instructs her legion of ‘duplicants’: "I need 10,000 hits like this to make me rich, OK, bitch? … I’m thinking Britney, Missy/I don’t care if it’s shitty/You know who once won a Grammy?/Ace of Base and Milli Vanilli".
Unfortunately, despite the Margaret Atwood-style storyline hanging the whole thing together, it doesn’t seem as much of a cohesive statement of intent as Is was. The time travel motif inevitably seems a bit contrived at times, and weighing in at 25 songs and 77 minutes it feels a little bit flabby (a common complaint with these hip-hop chaps and chappettes – as Ms Superstar herself seems to acknowledge, when the narrator on the opening track intones "I’m going to keep this brief, because I know most people skip intros – and with good reason"). Also, whereas the previous album sounded refreshingly different, some of the electro and guitar noises sound suspiciously zeitgeist-y, and at times come dangerously close to Peaches for our liking (‘…Drugs’ sounds very much like the work of a woman who has been spending too much time in the trendier areas of London).
Quibbles aside, though, My Machine is for the most part another cracking record. Its tricksy conceptual nature doesn’t detract from the potential hits: current single ‘Coochie Coo’ (which may or may not be about a "lady’s part"), the abovementined ‘10,000 Hits’, and ‘Quitting Smoking Song’, which is this album’s ‘Babysitter’ ("I’m gonna cuss Benson and Hedges/Cuss Philip Morris/Cuss all you motherfuckers ‘til I reach the chorus"). Frequently spoken of in novelty terms, along with the more high-profile likes of Missy Elliot, Kanye West and Outkast, Princess Superstar is, in fact, probably one of the most interesting of the current crop of American rap artists. |
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| Mat Beal - 8/10 |
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