About

With his high-pitched voice, his weird, smart-ass stance, and his preference to conversate with others rather than just rap, producer/rapper Madlib's alter-ego Quasimoto has always seemed the little-brother of the Parliament-Funkadelic character, Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk. Previous albums walked this character through a landscape of shrooms, weed, and chopped-up jazz-funk that were some of the most cherished beats in the Madlib catalog, and with these strange, mothership connections all strung together in a sensible style, this animated, snout-nosed smoker has some bona fide classics in his back catalog, making this merely good set look like a serious drop-off. 

Yessir Whatever suffers from being disjointed and a bit too much like a sketchbook, but the album is pulled together from 12 years of archival recordings, some of them previously released on rare comps and out-of-print vinyl. The bud smoker's anthem "Sparkdala" and the pro-weed, anti-money roller "Green Power" are both fully fleshed out highlights landing here in their original mixes, while the great B-side "Seasons Change" gets its proper home here, standing tall on the album level with its breezy, '60s-styled rumination on the passage of time. "Seasons Change" is also a prime example of the album's biggest frustration in that the rich cut is aggravatingly short, while many of the new cuts feel unfinished and chopped, offering fascinating grooves and complicated sonic landscapes that deserve more hang time. Bundle them together and things get real choppy. 

Still, Lord Quas started as a secret project where only friends received private tapes, so if Yessir Whatever seems too extra and too insider, it's totally within the project's spirit. Don't start here, but material-starved fans who have devoured earlier efforts will welcome this like a bag of scraggly "get-by" weed found during a drought. — (via AllMusic)

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Yessir Whatever isn't an odds-and-ends consolation prize-- it's an interesting cross-section of Madlib's personal archives, and its scattershot nature is more a stylistic matter than a quality-control issue. The 12 songs on the album were written and recorded over a span of about a dozen years, going back at least as far as being concurrent with the earliest Lootpack releases (at least if the 1997 lyrical datestamp on “Brothers Can't See Me” is any indication). And even the earliest material here has that certain imprint that made the Quasimoto records so offbeat: mood-whiplash sequencing, tape-deck-quality fidelity with Jeep-quality beats, and rhymes that sound like a down-for-whatever stoner verbally sparring with the cartoon devil on his shoulder.

That familiar pitched-up voice starts the record on 2004's thousand-copy single “Broad Factor”, which opens with a declaration that “I know you're tired of dumb shit” and then goes on for a couple of verses about how good he is at getting his bone on. This isn't Madlib at his most esoteric: the beat's sourced from Johnny “Guitar” Watson's endlessly sampled “Superman Lover", and even if the sex rhymes are fiendishly true to his alter-ego's altered id, they're also more slick than outrageous. Not to knock it, of course; Madlib's nearly as raw in classicist mode as he is when he lets his psychedelic/jazzbo inclinations take over. But the more off-the-path work he did in the early-mid 2000s has a strength that stretches far past pretty-good indie rap into the stuff that cults are made of, and it's that prime material from assorted limited-edition 7” releases and EPs that'll be the draw here.

“Seasons Change” was axed from Further Adventures when a Roy Ayers sample didn't clear in time, and what could've been the best cut on that album was relegated to the B-side of a “Bullysh!t” 7” released on the one-off label Lord Inamel's Wax in 2005. It's brought back here in full, a smooth-fusion lost classic that trades on a good vibes/bad vibes dichotomy and includes one of the better self-descriptions of the Madlib aesthetic going (“Top choice, low rate, no gate, high voice/ It's like we dipped the beat in water now we up on moist”). “The Front” and “Youngblood” were the respective A and B-sides of a 2005 Stones Throw Fan Club 45, and they fill the bill by emphasizing Madlib's own voice muttering restrained stress raps coolly through smooth jazz gone warped from repeated exposure to foundation-rattling low end. And going back a few years to 2002's Astronaut EP unearths a title track that, true to Quasimoto tradition, riffs off some Melvin Van Peebles Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death gems and careens disorientingly between three different voices-- Madlib, Quas and the sampled Van Peebles-- to jarringly conversational effect. There's also one of the best-spit lines you'll ever hear from Madlib's voice, pitched-up or otherwise; the way he rattles off “wouldn't be no more angel to me... anyway” is a surprising salvo of acrobatic flow from a helium voice that usually sounds casually flippant.

A good part of this collection trades a bit on the mythology of those seldom-heard early Quasimoto experiments of the late 90s, when it was just stuff Madlib kept between himself and a few friends who were privy to his beat tapes. And while there's nothing revelatory production-wise if you've heard Lootpack's Soundpieces: Da Antidote, there's a little workshopper's insight in these protoypes for The Unseen-caliber bluntedness. They're a bit more focused (and less attention-grabbing) than ensuing years' choppy, non-sequitur-filled Quasimoto joints, rolling off a sound that aims to synthesize East Coast boom-bap into something a bit more sun-baked. The sleepy guitar loop on “Planned Attack” and the squeaky synthesizer whistle on “Brothers Can't See Me” are, along with his nothing-fancy scratching, the only things really brought in to accompany the breaks. But the drums are heavy enough and smartly assembled to the point that Madlib's foundation was clearly already pretty strong. And even if the spare, downbeat early draft of “Green Power” here doesn't measure up to the intricate, layered bop-bounce of the Unseen version, it still doesn't sound like much that was going on back in the late '90s-- and it was actually enough to start building one of the most voracious cult fanbases in hip-hop, so here we are. This isn't the new Quas album people might've hoped for, but as someone who values the obscure and underheard in other peoples' work, it's good to know Madlib has the same context, respect, and enthusiasm for his own vaults, too. — (via Pitchfork)

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Label: Stones Throw Record
Format: Vinyl, LP, Compilation, Reissue, Silver Sticker Cover
Reissued: 2025 / Original: 2013
Genre: Hip Hop
Style: Rap, Conscious

File under: Hip Hop
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