E-Mail This Article to a Friend A question of balance Akrobatik takes it from the streets to the prep schools and back BY FRANKLIN SOULTS

So have you seen that new Budweiser commercial? It goes a little somethin’ like this: on an empty nighttime street corner, a group of white kids, decked out in baggy clothes and sideways caps and carrying a six-pack of Bud, bump into a group of black kids, also carrying a six-pack of Bud but sporting tasteful dress shirts and slacks. Both groups stop to stare, the white kids looking sheepish and the black kids looking embarrassed for them, but after they pass each other, the black kids burst out laughing. It’s all good, the ad suggests, because this Vanilla Icey encounter conveys no real threat to boyz who’ve left the hood with their sense of identity and their taste for cheap beer intact.

In some respects, Boston rapper Akrobatik would be a natural candidate to join that confident group of African-American Bud drinkers. When I recently tried to reach the Dorchester native by phone on his European tour, I had to poke around in Germany and Austria before I finally located the MC in a hotel room in the Netherlands politely wondering what had taken me so long to find him. Now in his late 20s, the former Jared Bridgeman started hitting stages just after Vanilla Ice topped the charts, eventually scoring an underground EP and touring Europe twice (his third trip is with DJ Fakts One and New York’s Breez Evahflowin opening for their frequent collaborator, Boston native Mr. Lif).

But Akrobatik has also been to Europe four separate times as Jared Bridgeman, civilian — not an unusual number, perhaps, when you consider that he went to Roxbury Latin. According to Worth magazine, this all-boys prep school in West Roxbury has been known to send more than 20 percent of its graduates to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, the greatest percentage accepted by that Ivy League troika from any single high school in the world. But though some might see that statistic as a great return for the modest yearly tuition of $14,000 (fourth-ranked Groton costs more than $24,000 a year), it’s an utterly unfeasible investment for almost any kid from Codman Square, the neighborhood where Jared Bridgeman grew up. This southeast corner of Dorchester has made remarkable strides, but a 1994 study by the Codman Square Health Center still found that 97 percent of area households had annual incomes below $20,000.

"The segregation problem in Boston is very rough," says Akrobatik from his Dutch hotel. "Someone like Lif, someone like myself, we were both lucky to go to private schools from a young age — 12 years old or something like that. And I think that that education — not just the curriculum, but the experience of being around people that are different from you — it puts you in a position where you can work with other people. And not just white people — Asians, Muslims, whoever. You know, if you’re in a concentrated area where everyone has the same perspective and you never leave that perspective, it makes it difficult to even have the desire to get up and out. And I hope that maybe what we’re doing will get more people to see that there is definitely more."

That suggests that Akrobatik wouldn’t laugh along with the black kids in that Bud commercial. His hip-hop moniker, after all, not only highlights his dexterous flow and multiple skills (he occasionally produces as well as raps) but also offers a neat double shot of the "c"-to-"k" misspellings favored by boyz who are still in the ’hood. Likewise, the cover of his 2003 debut album, Balance (Coup d’État Entertainment), shows the husky rapper in an oversized Patriots jersey and headband, a look that has caused misunderstandings even in Europe.

"When the rest of the world wants to get a glimpse of what black people are like, it’s usually through a music video," he explains. "And those are, like, the worst caricatures of black culture in existence. So when I walk into a hotel in Germany and I got my football jersey and my jeans on and my sneakers, people look at me, and the first thing they think of is the guy on MTV and assume that that’s my culture and that’s what I’m about. I find myself having to have a lot of conversations to try and diffuse that."

One spin of Balance would surely do the job as well. After a brief intro, the album kicks into its topic statement/title track, in which Akrobatik disses both the gangsta caricature that has impressed so many white suburban wanna-bes and also its inverse, the hood-free world of underground hip-hop bohemia. "There’s no balance in rap, you either a nerd or a thug/You either got too many big words or bust too many slugs/You could study for years and be the world’s top scholar/But trying to make the fans feel dumb won’t make them holler/And this shit is hard to earn so these thugs need to learn that they only fucking it up for the kids when it’s they turn."

The space that Akrobatik maps for his own style can be found in his subtle repeat of that qualifier "too many." By reserving the right to drop a few big words and bust a few slugs, he hints at something that the music itself broadcasts loud and clear: Akrobatik is a populist idealist, which is to say he’s old-school to the core. In his music and his raps, he’s reaching for the singular model that hip-hop will never reclaim, that late-’80s/early-’90s golden moment when the genre was as open-ended yet cohesive as rock was in the mid ’60s and reggae was in the ’70s.

"That’s the era that made me want to be a rapper," he admits, "and I think that I take most of my influences from that time period, because I don’t really think that most of what’s out now is going to have longevity. A perfect example is that while we’re taking these rides from city to city on this tour, you know, it’s like most of the music we listen to is A Tribe Called Quest and Diamond D and KRS-One and Big Daddy Kane. We think that’s the best possible shit you can find."

With a few notable exceptions, Balance’s 15 tracks aren’t explicitly retro in style, but their poise between hooky soul and spare hardness is retro in spirit. From the lowdown bounce of "Balance" — think Craig Mack’s "Flava in ya Ear" — to a closing reminiscence over personal and musical history tellingly titled "Here and Now," their various grooves and moods show a remarkable cohesion, especially given the numerous producers (Akrobatik also produces one cut, perhaps as a template). The disc is also weighted from slipping too far one way or the other by Akro’s solid, mid-tempo flow, like KRS-One mellowed with a warm shot of Spearhead’s Michael Franti. "It is not rocket science," he mutters on the intro to the album’s bonus hidden track, just "straight terms, straight talk."

As Akrobatik would be the first to admit, such simplicity is also not unprecedented. In the hip-hop underground, his feel for the ’hood and history is mirrored by Brother Ali’s equally earthy accomplishment, Shadows on the Sun (Rhymesayers), an underappreciated debut that also cuts its righteousness — like Akro, he’s pro-women, anti-Bush, and the rest — with straightforward boasts and putdowns. In Akrobatik’s case, those include "Hypocrite," a smirking bounce dropped right after "Balance" in which he allows some "ignorant rhymes" to slip through on an escape clause ("I’m a hypocrite just like you"). Likewise, "The Bonecrusher" delivers just what it promises with queasy sound effects laid under another bouncy beat, a fantasy rectified elsewhere when he lets "Cooler Headz" prevail during a tense club showdown.

If the sum of these cuts doesn’t stun like Lif’s apocalyptic tour of late capitalism, I Phantom (Definitive Jux), their variety nonetheless makes for a deeply satisfying album — a solid companion to inspired independent hip-hop releases this year from the Majesticons, Babbletron, Diverse, Northern State, Tes, and plenty more. Together, these discs create an alternative world that would seem to lack only sales figures to make it as exciting as the rap universe that existed circa 1989 — and I’m not even counting those discs by heavy nerds with really big words, like Aesop Rock’s mind-boggling upcoming Bazooka Tooth (Definitive Jux).

And yet, what almost all these artists take for granted is our current cultural respite, a delusion of ease that even allows Anheuser-Busch to mock the white boys. Akrobatik, I think, knows better because he knows kids who will never walk on that Bud commercial’s perfectly safe street corner. The most atypical and immediately attention-getting cut on the album, "Remind My Soul," is about them, a thought he jotted down in 20 minutes. Over a world-music beat, the rapper bemoans the way the dreams of ancestors from Nat Turner to Arthur Ashe have failed: "We all crumb snatchers in this land of big cake/So why we killing for the crumbs when there’s so much at stake/Remind my soul/Of the time we were great before the self-hate/Wait. We still great, but."

Says Akrobatik, "When you’ve had such opportunities like I’ve had — I know that everybody doesn’t get these opportunities. When I come back and tell my friends the stories that I tell, it’s just like they’re amazed. And there are certain things that, if you don’t have it and you want it, there are ways that you can get it, if you’re willing to organize and push for it. It’s just like, we all, you know, we just all trying to make it together. If everybody’s pulling somebody up, we should be straight."