*** Mike Ladd

EASY LISTENING FOR ARMAGEDDON

(Scratchie/Mercury)

On Easy Listening for Armageddon, 26-year-old Mike Ladd, a Boston-based poet/rapper who emerged from the Nuyorican spoken-word scene, offers a different take on what's come to be known as trip-hop. Although Easy Listening is full of trip-hop's musical signposts, the tracks are spare and elastic enough to accommodate what's really trippy: Ladd's free-form verse. His monologues are steeped in Afro-culture and American politics (i.e., Afro-American cultural politics). But he rarely resorts to propaganda or cliché. His performances are endowed with Last Poets-style social commentary; it's grounded in reality, yet there's a post-apocalyptic vibe to the wacky title track, "Blade Runner," and "I'm Building a Bodacious Bodega for the Race War," which brings to mind the George Clinton/Sun Ra school of Afro-sci-fi-psychedelia. Ladd balances yesterday and tomorrow with a keen sense of the dictum "If you don't know where you've been, you can't know where you're going"; but he's centered squarely in the here and now.

-- Roni Sarig