New Diggity

Tanya Morgan Brooklynati (Interdependent Media) (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

That commercial hip-hop has been a state of embarrassing stasis for something like five years now is, at this point, hardly a controversial statement. But if mainstream hip-hop has failed due to a lack of both ingenuity and imagination, its underground counterpart has floundered by going too far in the other direction. Its leading lights — chief among them old souls like Planet Asia and KRS-One — rail against the banality of their more lucrative stepbrothers until they sound less like battle rapping and more like bitter griping. At a certain point the colossal expenditure of energy starts to seem like devoting a blog to telling people Paul Blart: Mall Cop is a bad movie.

Thank God, then, for hip-hop trio Tanya Morgan, whose latest, Brooklynati, is both an antidote for radio's emptiness and the underground's piousness. It's a dense, determined record, one where Von Pea, Donwill and Ilyas take turns delivering nimble rhymes over humid, hazy R&B rhythms.

It should be fodder for the frustrated but, to their credit, Tanya Morgan seem distinctly uncomfortable pandering to the backpack set. Early in the record they lament, "My man says, 'Pea, we gotta get the adults'/ I said, 'Man, we gotta get to 'em both," and Brooklynati is as comfortable tweaking the ideals of indie rappers as it is subtly rebelling against commercial culture. The group mocks the tendency of hip-hop heads to elevate mid-'90s one-hit wonders to legendary status in a series of skits about a group called Hardcore Gentleman who, to quote Brooklynati's fictitious radio announcer, are celebrating "the 15-year anniversary of their classic — and only — single, 'Hardcore Gentlemen.' They'll be at Humphrey Lefty's this Friday, performing 'Hardcore Gentlemen' ... 15 times in a row." The song, when we finally hear it, is hilarious, a clever hodgepodge of every bad '90s hip-hop cliché, right down to the ODB shout-out. This is Brooklynati's subtlest, most effective dig, an acknowledgement that being uneasy with the present shouldn't mean retreating into the past.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)