Music Box | Overlooked Albums: Diverse

Mike Newmark Columnist

Diverse
One A.M.
[Chocolate Industries; 2003]

Chicago rapper Diverse possesses one of the best flows I’ve ever heard: quick, buttery, and rolling off the tongue so effortlessly that it makes you wonder if he’s ever broken a sweat. His tone is uncommonly musical, moving up and down his register and accentuating syllables in syncopated fashion. It seems that precious few rappers still pay attention to the sound of what they say; think of Kanye West, whose rhymes have been laid down with meticulous deliberation but come out of the oven stiff and clunky. Poetry is as much about flow as it is about content, and Diverse clearly gets that. Yet he deftly avoids the trap of “sound-for-sound’s-sake” à la Busdriver and Dose One. Make no mistake: These songs mean something.

Diverse leaps from confident salvos announcing his arrival (“Certified”) to meditations on the music business (“Just Biz”) to love songs (“In Accordance”) with the same flair for sweet-sounding wordplay. “In Accordance” doesn’t contain a single “I love you” or pet name, but “I estimate that our destination is ours to choose, this revelation is ours to lose, I hope we choose to continue our evolution” (spoken within five seconds). Those who have heard Diverse’s previous placid collaborations with Mos Def and Caural may be surprised by the brashness of much of One A.M. “Certified” and “Uprock,” are loud, uncompromising tracks that still throw Diverse’s raps into sharp relief. “Ain’t Right” and “Just Biz” find him residing closer to his comfort zone but still outside of it, rapping about the plight of man over backdrops that are sparkling, upbeat and chilled-out. Even if Diverse makes One A.M. sound easy, one gets the sense that it represented a challenge for him that he surmounted with honors.

Being from the fraternal music community that is Chicago, Diverse receives contributions from the Midwest’s finest, including RJD2, Prefuse 73 and jazzbos Rob Mazurek and Jeff Parker. Jazz is indeed an influence on One A.M., but because jazz-rap had nearly died by 2003, most of the album sidesteps overt displays of it in favor of swaggering funk and icy glitch-hop grooves. Nevertheless, this 2003 album can feel like a throwback to 2000, when Talib Kweli’s Reflection Eternal wowed listeners with intelligent rhymes and jazz-inflected beauty. It’s a wonder how jazz-rap fell out of fashion, given the timelessness of jazz itself, but even Reflection Eternal feels a little dated in 2007. Not One A.M.: The music represents the past, present, and future of hip-hop all at once, and Diverse will sound fabulous until people don’t listen to music anymore.