TOWN LOVE is an online art museum dedicated to celebrating the vibrant past and present of Northwest Hip-Hop. You can browse by artist or browse by year.

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Artist: Prose & Concepts

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Everything is Nice

“The country’s losing lives while the leader’s out of touch… The shit that be happening… is what got me rapping…” These lyrics loop throughout the title track of Everything is Nice by Seattle hip-hop OGs Prose & Concepts (aka Six In The Clip) whose trippy self-released second album, from 1997, is perfect headphones music for these times. The production is inventive ear candy, while the lyrics continue to hold deep resonance 23 years on. Novocaine 132 wrote this review for The Rocket music newspaper back in the ‘90s about it:

The second album, Everything is Nice, from Seattle’s legendary Prose & Concepts, is as much a Northwest original as the neon Red Hook sign shown in the cover photo. Their debut record, Procreations, brought increased pride to Seattle rap fans through tracks like “W.O.T.R.” “Do You Know?,” “Allone in This Field” and “Roll Call on the 1 and 2’s.”

Everything is Nice continues to prove that literacy and hip-hop aren’t necessarily antonyms. From the cannabis-soaked “Tiny Bubbles,” to the poetic tactics of “Courting Miss Understood,” to the sweet, drifting chorus on “The Ballad,” the album stands head and shoulders above the recycled gangster releases pervading the charts. My personal favorite cut, “Turntable Rhapsody in E Minor,” had me asking turntablist DJ Ace why he didn’t “put that on something” (for instance, Return of the DJ Volume II, where it certainly belongs). I wish I could truly say that everything is nice, but like Goodie Mob said, “I wanna tell you that it’s all good but it ain’t”; one of the group’s MCs, Michael “Dub” Weltmann, died on the last day of 1996. His verse in the closing song “Loose Cannon” will, to many, always be an eerie reminder of just how fragile life really is. I think we need a moment of silence.

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Procreations

There was a time in the mid ’80s when I loved rap like life itself because it was exuberant and out-of-control and made me wanna swagger down the street kissing boys I didn’t know (in my mind only, understand). But later on, rappers started getting cooler and cooler, and I fuckin’ hate cool people. They’re always telling the rest of us to mellow out and stop embarrassing them.

I liked Six in the Clip, though. They were a local, racially mixed crew of screwballs whose snotty rhymes could inspire entire roomfuls of jaded rockers to…actually move.

Now they’re called Prose and Concepts and they are serious. Uh oh…

Gone is the uneven feel of Six in the Clip; now all these guys rap like pros. Like most rappers who “get serious,” they’ve laid back a bit, but not everyone will see that as a problem. The DJ is superb, the samples understated-no real show-offy stuff, except in the lyrics, which are mainly the old school type raps about how great the rappers are, with some nonsense rhymes that sound good thrown in (“Knick knack paddy whack, give the fools a Prozac”). That’s all fine by me; I don’t need to hear any more about big butts or big guns for a while.

My fave here is the insanely catchy “P,” which is about pee. It’s one of the only moments on the album when the guys seem to really cut loose and have some fun. In fact, some of the songs have an almost sinister undercurrent to them; sampled minor chords throb hypnotically behind droning rhymes.

This is an impressive enough first effort, but now that these guys have proved they can rap, maybe they’ll go all out and throw us a party again. (This review originally appeared in The Rocket and was written by Dawn Anderson.)

Procreations was created in and features appearances from:

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