![[Paradise Don't Come Cheap]](new.gif)
New Kingdom
Paradise Don't Come Cheap
Gee Street (CD)
Gee Street Records is the division of Island Records that has produced such
progressive hip hop luminaries as P.M. Dawn and the Jungle Brothers. New
Kingdom's pairing of super-aggressiveness with strangely transcendent
beauty puts them right at home among such singular acts as these. Blending
trippy hip hop with elements of skate thrash, this Brooklyn-based duo
generates a type of music that would have seemed right at home on the
Judgment Night soundtrack of a few years back (right after the
Biohazard/Onyx collaboration!) were it not for the truly introspective
depth and symbolism of its lyrics (listen to the title track as it
communicates triumphant desperation or the apocalyptic "Horse Latitudes"
and you'll see what I mean). Paradise Don't Come Cheap shows that
truly compelling, "thinking-man's" hip hop can still be found -- but that, for
the most part, it's outside of the "gangsta's paradise". --Noah
Wane