Aceyalone was just a scant 15 years old when he composed the following rhyme, which kicked off “Cornbread,” the boisterous standout from the Freestyle Fellowship’s second album, 1993’s Innercity Griots (4th & Broadway): “Telephone poles, baking hot rolls/A ’91 Pinto sitting on Vogues/Bubble gum tick-tock hound-dog fleas/Cock-a-doodle doo-doo and some hoghead cheese/Leap out the room, grab the old broom/Eat a watermelon and walk on the moon/Cherry Coke cantaloupe little old maid/A big black berry inside the Kool-Aid/A bass guitar, a old fruit jar/A green canteen and a chocolate bar.”
It’s a non sequitur classic, matching nursery-rhyme ease of delivery with an intuitive sense of cadence and syllabic interplay. More than a decade later, Acey’s built an impressive career on these protean fragments of rhyme, having established himself as one of hip-hop’s most flexible wordsmiths. What Eminem’s doing with flow today, Acey and his Freestyle Fellows — Self-Jupiter, Mikah 9, and P.E.A.C.E. — were pioneering back then. Their hip-hop community was a Los Angeles counterculture that existed under the long shadow of the city’s gangster-rap scene. It’s still extant today, with new legions of MCs and producers for whom the Fellowship is the defining touchstone of their musical evolution.
Yet despite two stunning albums from the early ’90s — 1991’s To Whom It May Concern . . . (4th & Broadway) and Innercity Griots — Freestyle Fellowship are virtually unknown to the record-buying public. Aceyalone is the only member of the group who has released solo projects, and his first two efforts — All Balls Don’t Bounce (Capitol; 1995) and A Book of Human Language (Nu Gruv/Project Blowed; 1998) — have gone just as commercially unrewarded (and, of course, critically lauded) as the Fellowship albums.
On Acey’s most-recognizable single, “Mic Check” (from All Balls Don’t Bounce), he opened with the arrogant boast “I start most of my raps off kinda slow/Just so you could see exactly where it gonna go/I make sure your body’s strapped in/Cause I’m a tailspin and you’re liable to get thrown.” Back when Acey was rapping triple time with internal rhyme, he could easily brag on how intricate he was.
But several years of overachieving for a small cadre of cult listeners has taken its toll on the man who dubs himself “The MC of the Future.” His new Accepted Eclectic (Nu Gruv/Ground Control) is a much more measured version of his signature serpentine stylings. The dumbing-down strategy is evident from the opening track, “Rappers Rappers Rappers 12 for 10,” which originally appeared on the 1999 Strength Magazine Presents Subtext compilation): “To all you big willie rappers/Silly rappers, my mack milly rappers smoke a Philly rappers/Lilly-illy killy-killy rappers, not really rappers/Yah, all you signed rappers, blind to what’s going on behind rappers/Crime rappers, I’m in my prime rappers.”
The song’s meant as a lambasting of, well, pretty much everyone else in the game. But it comes off as a repetitive, whiny screed that smacks more of bitterness than confidence. You can’t blame Acey for being mad, but diluting the science isn’t the answer (even if he means to be ironic). The rest of the album is scattered. In some places, he seems way off course: “I Got To Have It Too,” a rehash of the Ed O.G. classic, and “Master Your High,” which is the type of weed track most rappers rely on for lack of better subject matter. But Acey’s never had to lean on the tried and true, and elsewhere on the album, he oils up his larynx for a true-to-old-form session. “Five Feet” and “Accepted Eclectic” feel as if they’d been penned back when he thought he could still save the world. The other high point is “Golden Mic,” a convincing ripoff of quick-tongued Southern bounce rhymes, though to hear Acey tell it, the theft is reciprocal — he moans, “Niggas been biting my shit for years.”
Whether he invented double-time rhymes or not, Acey’s earned a healthy portion of his arrogance. And in the coming months, he’s hoping to parlay his talent into success not only for his solo album but for albums from a newly reunited Freestyle Fellowship. Jupiter is out of jail, P.E.A.C.E. has recovered from his car accident, and Mikah has been MCing club nights in LA. All of them are past their pain and eager to commit testament to wax once again as a unit. As Acey says on Accepted Eclectic’s “Hardship,” “I take my pain just like a G.” He’s no gangster, but he at least understands that there’s wisdom to be gleaned from sorrow, and that a true black whirlwind never dies.
