Features | Awards

Most Absurd Hip-Hop Album That's Not Tha Carter III Award

By Chet Betz | 16 December 2008

Noah23
Rock Paper Scissors
(Legendary Ent./Plague Language; 2008)








Weezy’s insanity can’t be argued against but, amazingly, the fact that Noah’s a little more conscious about his ridiculousness doesn’t really detract from the glee of listening to his work. Weezy believes in himself out of brain dysfunction whereas Noah believes in a way that’s too smart and too searching for its own good, spontaneously skipping forward on a line of thought that tethers the divide between brilliance and incoherence. This is the same line that Weezy just sits on until it sinks down into the pit. And the pit is Lil Wayne’s own all-consuming maw. Noah23 is able to focus outside of himself—thus, his remix of “A Milli” called “Canadian Dollars” and thus the crucial moment on Rock Paper Scissors closer “Fame” where he follows a brag with “and the children will play in a hyper-dimensional plane / and we all get to have fifteen minutes of fame.” Noah23’s rapping is the sound of a mind bending but not yet completely broken by data overload. He acquiesces to its almighty form and pieces together little milliseconds of insight that flash out like sparks flying from the clash of titanic colors, of reverie with imagery with science with fiction with paranoia with some intangible hope. He doesn’t have millions like Lil Wayne but, again like Lil Wayne, he and his art are made of millions. Millions of what? Millions of everything.