For purists’ sake, Evidence has been a heavy hitter in the Hip Hop production world since Kobe Bryant was endorsed by adidas. His new collaboration project A Whole New Cookbook with L.A. symphony alum Cookbook fulfills underground Hip Hop lovers simmered chunks of bottom-heavy beats, streetwise and pop cultural humor-laced rhymes, and heritage pride as juice to sip lightly during the meal. Counterintuitively, Evidence’s smoke-stacked studio filled with vinyl and equipment holding stems to new songs is a fertile ground for the sober Cookbook to unveil his cipher-ready moxie. It’s packed with laid-back braggadocio over intelligent prog rock samples, slow yet purposeful snare chops, and sauntering bass lines that coats your four walls with new colors of Los Angeles-style graffiti.
The EP starts with the title track headnodder with former Lootpack member DJ Romes on the cuts, setting the course of a short boom-bap odyssey. Cookbook establishes his readiness to take on any enemy and friend for the short ride. The ensuing interlude features a Far Eastern-accented testimonial from a girl “Helen” that seems ventriloquistic from Cookbook and Ev. But this poses like a mere filler track stating the obvious about today’s digital age, and choosing to not compete in it. She laments about the struggle to be noticed, questioning people stooping towards actually paying for music while vying for attention amongst their competition. You can see that later on the self-reflective “It’s On Me” with his L.A. compadre and longtime Visionaries emcee LMNO along with Madchild when he states: “I hate that I’m a phantom to the masses after all the anthems.” Cookbook also opines about how people emotional attachment to social media for how they value friends. This is a valid point, but he seems somewhat vulnerable and contradictory to his mission for re-emergence to the listening public as a “whole new” self.
The most explosive song is “TBH,” with an illuminous waa-pedaled guitar sample loop which sounds like a backpacker’s fantastic voyage from Evidence, along with his Dilated People’s partner DJ Babu adding his precise turntablist chirps and euphonious rap vocal samples sliced repeatedly for the chorus. Cookbook shows his pride in his heritage and elder statesmen status with vigor by belting, “The John Paul of your town hall/The Puerto Rico gringo looking wrinkled singing to the crowd raw.” Even though this is a proclaimed as a new beginning for Cookbook, the motivator theme continues to pop up tends to overtake some of Cookbook’s persona on fifth track “Preachers of L.A” as he makes reference to selling out stadiums like Christian evangelist Joel Olsteen, but being a martyr for underground rap denizens longtime crusade to uplift Hip Hop culture while eschewing capitalistic rhetoric. This midpoint lacks a necessary arc to take the EP over the top, as the song’s sluggish bassline toppled with spacious snares and cymbals that momentarily lessens the luster amongst all the other tracks, with a banal chorus chant “I need money!” hindering its strength.
The project’s other questionable track is the interlude “Omaha,” repetitive with an cartoonish vocal sample of a speech that gives the New Cookbook some distance from the other tracks making it less cohesive than it could be. But the aspirational “Phillip Drummond” reignites the EP, exposing Cookbook as going for the gold while reaching out for the respect of the aging b-boy crowd demographic by bevy of eighties and nineties metaphors like Quentin Tarantino’s unheralded film, True Romance, Evidence’s pale skin and Midas touch to beatmaking: “Your flow’s dead like Gary Coleman/ When Ev hooks up the beat, it’s ‘White Boy Day’ like Gary Oldman.” The unassuming freestyle on “Cookbook Got The Answers” is a dramatized Five Fingers of Death freestyle scene from his Sway In the Morning Show appearance. Cookbook’s freestyles effortlessly over an easy listening jazz-fused throbbing bass with a sparse cheerful whistle blow akin to Dee-Lite’s dance classic “Groove Is in the Heart.”
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Cookbook’s flow and Evidence’s beats combined serve underground rap fans well, goal-tending that they will rap for food: “After this one, we eating chicken tetrazzini/simmer weekly/collecting paper color of zucchini/Don’t know what they put in it, but Paul love it/We all love it/ Rock shit with a small budget”. Thrifty, low-down gritty and grimy Hip Hop for your mug. Bon appétit.
