After nearly two decades of on-off collaborations, the veteran musicians finally reach the finish line with their first full-length together, yielding a dozen tracks of solid, bare-bones hip-hop.
Producer Danger Mouse and rapper Black Thought have both made careers out of bridging cultural gaps. Danger Mouse first broke big as a producer with 2004’s The Grey Album, his mashup of vocals from JAY-Z’s then-swan song The Black Album with the instrumentals from the Beatles’ self-titled ninth full-length—colloquially known as The White Album. The Grey Album’s success led to production work with rappers like CeeLo Green—with whom he released two albums as the soul group Gnarls Barkley—and the late MF DOOM, as well as indie-rock polymaths like Damon Albarn and Beck. Black Thought, meanwhile, is a 30-year rap veteran and lead MC of the Roots who draws connections between capos, politicians, and pop culture in ruthless freestyles as often as he soothes and tickles audiences on The Tonight Show and Sesame Street. They each use music to bend time and history to their respective wills, finding the playful and the profane in every space they occupy.
The pair recognized each other as kindred spirits as far back as the mid-aughts. After working together on what would ultimately become a campy bonus track for Danger Mouse and DOOM’s 2005 Adult Swim collaboration The Mouse and The Mask, they began crafting an album originally called Dangerous Thoughts. Busy schedules eventually forced them to shelve the project for over a decade: Danger Mouse formed the duo Broken Bells with James Mercer of the Shins and produced albums for the Black Keys and Karen O, while Black Thought settled into his role in Jimmy Fallon’s house band and began his Streams of Thought EP series in 2018. After several false starts, the duo finally reaches the finish line with their first full-length collab, now called Cheat Codes. Their faith in each other is well placed, breeding a dozen tracks of solid, bare-bones hip-hop.
A reunion at this point in their respective careers is peculiar because they’re approaching it from different ends. The three volumes of Streams of Thought have rendered Black Thought more prolific as a solo artist than ever before; and while Danger Mouse has certainly worked with rappers since The Mouse and The Mask, he hasn’t produced an entire album for one in nearly 20 years. Luckily, they have natural chemistry. Mouse dives back into grainy loops that will be familiar to fans of his older rap work, though they’re generally less playful than you may be expecting. Tongue-in-cheek flourishes pop up every once in a while, like the twangy guitar lick grating against the crisp drums on “No Gold Teeth” or the patch of rhythmic hums on the hook of “Strangers.” On “Saltwater,” he even takes a stab at the sloping rhythms associated with Griselda to accommodate guest Conway the Machine. But most of these beats are standard boom-bap, handsome but not particularly adventurous.
Take opening song “Sometimes,” which turns a bed of violins, piano, guitar, and maudlin vocals into a pulpit for Black Thought to draw lines across Black history: “Images of grandeur from Jamel Shabazz, Dapper Dan/Clap your hands whether you’re in Paterson or Pakistan/Richard Wright, Black boy who grew into a Blacker man.” Black Thought’s flows are more rigid than those of a rapper like DOOM, whose syllable count and meter phase through dimensions, and the beats reflect his steady posture. This puts as much emphasis on his words as his technique, and Black Thought continues to rap his ass off. On “The Darkest Part” and “Aquamarine,” he taps into the same energy well as his famous Hot 97 freestyle to flip Public Enemy references and the constant struggles between science and religion into short parables of preservation. There’s a buzz to Black Thought’s rich baritone that amplifies each song’s sense of scale, whether he’s proclaiming his greatness from the mountaintops or sifting through personal trauma on a track like “Identical Deaths.”
And yet, as entertaining as this project is, there’s a sense that it could’ve been bigger, more substantial. Some songs are hampered by the decision to turn Black Thought’s vocals way down in the mix. Sometimes, it lends his voice a ghostly affect that serves the mood (“Because”). Other times, he sounds like he’s recording while standing 10 feet away from the mic (“The Darkest Part,” “Strangers”). Black Thought has gone on record as saying Cheat Codes isn’t another entry in the Streams of Thought series, but the album is so structurally and thematically similar to that series, it often becomes difficult to see the difference. Outside of its length and nearly two-decade incubation period—which, granted, resulted in an excellent posthumous DOOM verse on “Belize”—this would comfortably fit as Streams of Thought: Vol. 4.
But regardless of its scope, Danger Mouse and Black Thought bring good things out of each other. At Cheat Codes’ best, it’s electrifying to see the ways their respective obsessions with history and time inform the whole. Over the strobing synths and strings of “Saltwater,” Black Thought claims he’ll be “over 70 flipping the script regularly” before comparing himself to the late actor and activist Dick Gregory. Like that song, the album feels both modern and vintage—a swirl of distant touchstones happening all at once.
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