Rap-Rock
Street Sweeper Social Club
Street Sweeper Social Club
(Universal)
***1/2
Tom Morello has worn a lot of hats since his days of getting very, very angry on the subject of The Machine — from those occasionally awkward days in Audioslave to his protest-folk incarnation as The Nightwatchman — but none of them have fit as comfortably as his current project with The Coup’s socially conscious rapper Boots Riley. And unlike most rap-rock projects, Street Sweeper Social Club doesn’t suffer from the inane lyrics and pissed-off-for-the-sake-of-it cynicism that cripple the Limp Bizkits and Linkin Parks of the world. SSSC is a strong album because of Riley’s upfront tongue-in-cheekiness and his witty lyrics. “Fight! Smash! Win!” contains some of Riley’s sharpest barbs: “If you got a blacklist, I wanna be on it/If we gonna attack this, then we need to run it/If you see my hood, man, you might call it ghetto/Politicians are puppets, let’s get Gepetto.” Sharp rhymes, coupled with Morello’s guitar wizardry, make Street Sweeper Social Club a rarity: a rap-rock album worth listening to.
CURTIS WRIGHT
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