The year 2000 has been bubbling with amazing hip hop, and best of all, there has been something for everyone. Common’s Like Water For Chocolate was a personal, soulful, and musically diverse album. Dead Prez gave us unapolegetic political views with Let’s Get Free. Nia was more experimental, and showed the range of Blackalicious’ members Chief XCel and Gift of Gab. And if for some reason you were unmoved by those albums, Dilated People’s have arrived with The Platform to break hip hop down to what is essentially about: dope beats and rhymes.
This album is as consistent up-and-down as any release this year. Simply put, there isn’t even an average joint on the album. Even the intro embodies true hip hop. The title track begins the journey, and is a good indicator of what you’re likely to hear throughout the album. Over a tight Alchemist beat, Evidence rhymes, “I know my hunger’s real, I still get nauseous at shows/ My motto, I didn’t write, but this I quote/ It ain’t where you put your words, it’s where you don’t.” Even though Dilated Peoples’ songs aren’t laced with messages, lines like this allow you to really get a feeling for what they’re about by the time you’re done with the album.
Production honors are shared, as almost everyone who worked on this project shines. “No Retreat” boasts
a nice track from T-Ray, but it is the Alchemist and Evidence who supply most of the beats. Ev is
incredible on the mic throughout the album as well, and with this release he should become one of the
hottest commodities in hip hop. On “The Main Event,” he brings punchlikes like, “You better step up,
you’re looking kinda lost/ Claimin’ 2 ghetto streets that don’t even cross/ I you didn’t know, I’m a true
art-eest/ Who drops gems like on the run from police.” “Ear Drums Pop” brings more of the same, but
this time Evidence’s quotable is a little more serious: “I figured out in life that there’s more than one way/
That’s why I’m doing things I always knew I’d do one day/ I’ve seen many lands and tasted the best
crops/ I witnessed many cultures expressed through hip hop.” This album also features an equally
amazing remix of this joint, featuring Planet Asia, Defari, Everlast, and Phil Da Agony.
“Years in the Making” guides the listener through the long journey of Dilated Peoples as they came up in hip hop. Their path includes not only rhyming and production, but elements such as graff writing. Nothing but more brilliance on “The Last Line of Defense” and “The Shape of Things” (ft. Aceyalone), and hopefully you’ve heard their hit single “Work the Angles” by now, which many label one of the top songs of 1998.
What faults can be found with this album? The emceeing is so consistent, most songs can be judged purely on how nice the beats are. Although they achieve near-classic status, a very few tracks are not quite as interesting as the rest. “Right On,” which features the Alkaholiks, is one of the beats that doesn’t hit as hard as the rest, and so too is “Annihilation.” “Service” is a nice track, but left me wishing for one more verse. Instead, Babu cuts up the track for almost a minute and a half in the end. Still, these are by no means fast-forward tracks.
A review of this album cannot be complete without at least acknowledging the efforts of Babu and
Iriscience. It’s not that their contributions to The Platform are weak, rather they have simply been
outshined by Evidence, who completely steals the show. This is a breakthrough album for the west coast
underground - it is more consistent than Dre 2001, At the Speed of Life, or 40 Dayz and 40 Nights. In
fact, it just may be the best album to come out of California in a couple of years. Add one more to the
rapidly growing list of remarkable albums in the last year. Hip hip is great once again!
-Joe Kostelnik
