Mr. Lif
Emergency Rations
Def Jux

Political pop music has become so scarce it's almost an oxymoron. Pop's deal-makers and denizens aren't known for taking chances — it's a sure bet most entertainers aren't going to enter any kind of political or legal debate unless a paycheck is involved or a reputation is enhanced. And while hip-hop often runs counter to the squeaky clean world of the boy bands, its artists increasingly do nothing more than trade off a thug image.

On Emergency Rations, Boston's Mr. Lif, aka Jeffrey Haynes, does his best to counter this trend, offering a point-by-point, policy- and trend-specific rundown of everything that's wrong with America over the course of just seven songs and one spoken-word track.

Haynes takes his artistic and political cues from the chorusless bombast of "Welcome to the Terrordome," the brilliant centerpiece of Public Enemy's masterwork, Fear of a Black Planet. It's an influence Haynes acknowledges in an oh-so-brief sample in the background of Emergency Rations' centerpiece, "Home of the Brave."

Haynes is at his best, though, on "Get Wise '91," where he keeps the music simple with a funky, looped rhythm propelled by bass guitar, snare and high-hat. A low-key whoop adds an exclamation point every couple of measures. Musically, the song's a party anthem, fortified by typical hip-hop bravado:

If you're evaluating me/ what would it be?/ Number 1, 2 or 53?/ Well it really don't make a fucking difference to me/ 'cause I'll be doing this for eternity.

Then Haynes abruptly drops all pretense and lays into his targets:

So here's where it starts/ I rip apart charts/ and break hearts/ balance book knowledge with street smarts .../ Here's a riddle/ Now who abuses money from taxes/ makes a law and shields it from the people to make sure that it passes/ using evil's axis to ask us to all become fascists/ using our greatest fears to lash us...

The answer, of course, is President Bush ("I could smell the dawn of Armageddon when this dick was elected.") Haynes moves on to blast the welfare system and the notion of the United States as a melting pot. The marriage of Haynes' cynical, left-of-center politics with booty-shakin' dancefloor beats is peanut-butter-and-chocolate genius. It's as if House of Pain had used "Jump Around" to rail against Iran-Contra.

"Home of the Brave," whose second half breaks down the war on terrorism, is slightly less effective, mainly because Haynes backs the dubious theory that the Bush administration either deliberately allowed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to happen or spun them to boost the president's weak popularity and overthrow the Taliban, setting the stage for construction of a massive oil pipeline through Afghanistan.

Still, the first half of the song does a number on racial profiling, and Haynes' head is screwed on right for most of the anti-war screed, which concludes,

You can wear that piece of shit flag if you dare/ but they killed us because we've been killin' 'em for years

"Phantom," which features the same lush El-P production that made Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein such a critical hit last year, breaks down how US government policies and social codes marginalize people, turning them into husks of who they hoped to be.

If Emergency Rations has a weakness it's that Haynes couches it in a concept-album package. The opening track sets up a lame bit of fiction: Haynes has gone missing, and the US government must have disappeared him because of the highly political music he was working on. It's a theme that crops up throughout the album, and, whether Haynes realizes it or not, it disrupts the albums flow and diminishes the very real secret detentions of hundreds of noncitizens.

But listening to brief clips of paranoid fantasy is small enough a price to pay to listen to Haynes' energetic, vital music. On "Pull Out Your Cut," Haynes admonishes his audience, "Keep all those emotions bottled up/ now what's up/ You can't communicate once you became an adult/ Situations got raw/ 'cause you had lockjaw/ Your kids ended up learning about life from a pop star." As long as those kids pick up a healthy dose of skepticism from Emergency Rations, they'll do all right.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)