Rating:
  Review Date: January 4, 2007
  Website: Calm Website
  Label: Dirty Laboratory

Calm “Anti-Smiles” Album Review 
If you are a fan of radio or television hip-hop, or one of those cats a hip-hop linguist might refer to as an “ignit muthafucka,” you probably won’t get much of Calm’s new album “Anti-Smiles.” In fact, it’s probably better if you just stop reading now. Because although I like to consider myself a moderately intellectual individual, I had to listen to this album for over one month before I understood the majority of it, and some of it still makes me scratch the old dome in bewilderment.  

Most people don’t like intellectual hip-hop. Shit, we gotta think all day long right? Most of us would rather drink a forty, hit a blunt and watch TRL in the evening. But for the others, “Anti-Smiles” could possibly be the intellectual hip-hop album of the year. Time‘s personal and heartfelt lyrics accomplish his goal of writing songs “that give people the chills and goose bumps on their necks.” And AwareNess‘ eclectically cerebral production lays perhaps the perfect canvas for the words, stories and contemplations presented in the music.

Over the past month, I’ve consistently found myself in awe of several clever one-liners in the album. Time often gives the listener something to think about in just one line, with statements such as “Beauty’s on the inside but most humans are hollow,” “If love is blind then hate has 20/20 vision,” and “I got an after-party in my heart called love, bring on the juice and cookies.” Such lines will get the brain moving around for those of you who are into that sort of thing.

The Use of Metaphors in Hip-Hop
But what impressed me most about the album was its use of metaphor, especially conceptual metaphor, to get points across to the listener. I think metaphor is a tool that is not used enough in hip-hop lyrics and music. A metaphor is a direct comparison between two seemingly unrelated subjects. Taking this even further, a conceptual metaphor is the idea of understanding one concept in terms of another concept. This basically means using one complex word to define another complex word, as in “Love is War.”

Calm makes use of conceptual metaphor several times throughout the course of “Anti-Smiles.” One track compares life to walking through a wax museum. Another compares friends to watermelon, as they are “green with envy and red on the inside.” One track defines the devil as a Spanish-speaking seductress in Denver, while another defines life as an escalator that “keeps moving even if you pretend to take steps.”

Yet my two favorite metaphors in the album are extended, and can only really be understood by reading them aloud. The first is a metaphor comparing a man’s life to a garden:

His life is a garden, our friends are greed
Our friends are water, our friends are weeds
The government’s a gardener
He pimps for profit
And makes money off of shovels and hoes
His drugs are pesticides that kill the good and the bad
Either way the product’s tainted
The ax hits the ground covered in blood

The second is another metaphor about life, this one comparing it to several things that it is not:

Life isn’t a Thomas Kincade painting
Cause no beautiful paintbrush draws foster homes
No one looks like an airbrushed magazine model
And only soap opera characters don’t need jobs and a house phone
The majority of the population is obese and ugly
We’re not like those polite people we read about in poems
We’re not like the polite newscasters who’d rather show numbers for deaths
Instead of all the blood involved in war and disasters

I don’t know about you, but that shit is brilliant to me, and demonstrates uncommonly high levels of thought, preparation and intelligence behind every word, every rhyme and every accompanying beat. And that’s pretty much the impression I got from every track on Calm’s exceptional album “Anti-Smiles.” If this album is any indication of what the year 2007 will bring, I think the underground will be turning a lot of heads this year. Peace.