My Gut Reaction: O.C. - Starchild (February 16, 2005)

It took four years before Omar “O.C.” Credle was finally able to release a follow-up to his third album, Bon Appetit. One would assume that the project’s mixed reviews caused any label that may have been interested in the man’s past work to label him as record company poison, but that explanation just waves away the fact that each of O.C.'s albums had been released by a different label. It’s easier to run with the narrative that many critics and fans considered Credle to be well past his shelf life within this disposable genre of hip hop that we follow for some reason: after unleashing classic tracks such as “Time’s Up” and even taking radio accessibility for a spin and not screwing the pooch (see: “Far From Yours”), Bon Appetit set the audience’s expectations so high that there was just no way O.C. could ever clear the bar, so he went in the opposite direction, delivering lazy rhymes over beats from his D.I.T.C. brethren that were likely held back from other projects because they simply weren’t yet complete.

Although O.C. did manage to get a Jay-Z cameo on Bon Appetit, so I suppose he doesn’t believe it to be a complete waste of his time. Entirely different story from our perspective, though.

Starchild is O.C.’s fourth album, one that was released exclusively in Japan in 2005. Why is that, you ask? My theory is that Japan-based label Grit Records was the only one who saw any spark of life in the man’s then-recent work, and decided to take a gamble. Starchild eventually made its way across the Pacific, but it wasn’t cheap, as no American company picked up distribution rights, so the remaining O.C. fans had to put up import money in order to own an album that they could legitimately claim that none of their friends had. At least until Credle went the digital route and began offering it worldwide, I guess.

It’s easy to believe that O.C. treated the Starchild project as a way to reinvent himself, as it is the first album in his discography to feature absolutely zero participation from any of his D.I.T.C. bandmates, either behind the boards or in front of the microphone. (Speaking of, there is only one featured guest, who I’ll mention below, and he only pops up in an extremely limited role.) Production was instead sourced to relative unknowns Soul Supreme, Vanguard, and Floyd da Locsmif, all of whom do their damnedest to recreate the soulful boom bap that Credle sounded the most effective over in the past. Fans of the likes of Buckwild and DJ Premier, both former collaborators with our host, need not apply to Starchild, as you will likely walk away wondering why you ever cared about O.C. in the first place. Fans of scratching, however, should note that both DJ Revolution and Statik Selektah contribute to the project, although those names won’t exactly shift your perspective on the whole endeavor.

Curiously, shortly after the Japanese release of Starchild began stirring up hip hop media in the States, most of whom approached from the angle, “Wait, O.C. released another album?”, Credle announced that he had always planned for a U.S. version of Starchild, one that would remix the entire album with the assistance of the likes of Preemo, Pete Rock, and other bigger names that would attract more attention. This, obviously, never materialized, and may not have ever been in the works, although some reworks of Starchild songs do exist and have made their way to the marketplace. But I found that announcement to be a pretty huge middle finger to his actual production team: how would you feel if you contributed beats to an album, but when the artist is asked about it, he/she immediately claims that they plan on remixing it with an A-list producer and discounts your own work in the process? That’s pretty fucked up, if you ask me. Starchild never getting that promised remix album works as karmic payback in favor of the three producers who actually put in the time. Well, that, and the fact that Starchild is fucking terrible and nobody cared in the first place.

Whoops!

1. INTRO

Some actual scratching comes into play courtesy of Statik Selektah, but this is just an instrumental interlude-as-rap album intro otherwise.

2. EVARIDAE (FEAT. PHAROAHE MONCH)

The only track on Starchild that advertises a guest feature is the Floyd the Locsmif-produced “Evaridae”, with its egregiously-misspelled title attached to what sounds like the music that plays between modules in a science-based video series. (I see you, Look Around You.) Alleged guest Pharoahe Monch, a longtime friend of O.C.’s, allegedly performs during the alleged hook, allegedly making up for his absence on Bon Appetit, but said hook is objectively dull and generic-sounding, so the track straight up lives or dies with Omar’s bars, and the time of death for “Evaridae” was called approximately thirty seconds into its runtime, which, coincidentally, is twenty-nine seconds after I realized that the ridiculous spelling of the word “everyday” in the title reads more accurately as “ever-ready”. Our host sounds okay-ish, no question, but when a song is as boring as this, you have to find the strength to continue pushing the boulder up the hill, and that just doesn’t happen at any point. Groan.

3. WHO RUN IT?

Floyd da Locsmif’s production on “Who Run It?” sounds like the lounge music played in the waiting room of purgatory, and whenever an artist’s older performances are scratched into the instrumental or MacGyver’d together into a hook, a comparison is forced, and the outcome is hardly ever favorable. Somehow the beat also managed to sound too busy, amateurishly so, especially during that chorus, causing our host to come across as if he were drowning in an ocean of cacophony, and as is the natural reaction when presented with this scenario, Omar decides he would rather live than write coherent bars that are delivered in a fashion one could potentially classify as “interesting”. Damn.

4. THE PROFESSIONAL

Although Vanguard’s beat isn’t exactly what I’d typically want to hear Omar spit over, “The Professional” is the first actual decent track on Starchild, thanks to O.C.’s commitment to the cause. His bars are passable-to-okay over the looped sample that gives our host the soundtrack backing of a 1970’s cop procedural, his shit-talking hitting a few high notes throughout. The scratching in or vocal samples was a bit much, unintentionally shifting the focus to artists not named O.C., which is a mistake: once this shit was over, my lingering thought was, “Wait, which Nas verse does that scratched-in vocal come from?” (it’s “Stillmatic (The Intro)”, I believe) and not, “Boy, I sure would like to listen to some more O.C. rhymes, golly gee please oh please!”. So while it isn’t a complete failure, it does dress up as one in order to fit into the rest of Starchild.

5. 1NCE AGAIN

There is literally no reason for Omar to call this song “1nce Again” instead of just “Once Again” except to throw some shade in the direction of A Tribe Called Quest, which, why the fuck would anyone do that? Especially as the titular phrase is only evoked during a vocal sample from another artist. Soul Supreme’s horn-heavy instrumental is alright, bringing in some much-needed boom bap within a way-too-fucking-busy instrumental, but Omar sounds bored as shit, his bars never landing anywhere with any stability. He burns through his three verses pretty quickly: my guess is that he realized the food truck parked across the street from the studio was about to close up shop and he really wanted some carne asada tacos right that second. This leaves more than a minute and a half of instrumental to fill the run time, part of which is used up with some more scratching that also leads nowhere. Can I just get off here, please?

6. YOU DON’T STOP

Here’s the thing about Omar Credle: he’s a good technical rapper, in that he clearly has mastered the fundamentals of rhyming and is, technically, a good rapper. Skilled, even. But so is Nas, and a lot of his songs fucking suck: an artist is only as good as their musical backing, because without a solid foundation, this is just spoken-word poetry, and nobody wants to listen to that shit, especially me. (This is a point I’ve made before, but not as frequently since I’ve returned, so humor me a bit here.) Omar doesn’t necessarily need a producer with the clout of DJ Premier or a Buckwild to pull off a great song,, but he definitely should hire someone that isn’t afraid to let him know when the music playing around him is fucking boring as all hell, such as Soul Supreme’s beat for “You Don’t Stop”. Also, have Nas and O.C. never (officially) worked together because they sound so similar that we wouldn’t be able to tell them apart, and nobody is asking for a hip hop version of the Sleep With Me podcast? Discuss.

7. STORY TO TELL

Not so much a “story” as it is an attempt at an autobiography, but our host couldn’t be bothered to bless us with tales of his upbringing in anything approximating a remotely interesting way: O.C.’s childhood sounds pretty rote, and even he seems to think so, given his indefensible emotionless flow. (The only stuff that brings any spark of life to his voice is when he talks about some of his family members.) The motherfucker doesn’t even bother to rhyme during his first four bars. It’s as though Starchild were recorded just to pay back a gambling debt. Vanguard’s instrumental is also dull as fuck, although at least it tries to bring some sense of melody to the proceedings.

8. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?

Instrumental-wise, Soul Supreme’s work on “What Am I Supposed To Do?” (a phrase our host never utters, by the way, although he does say, “What the fuck am I supposed to do?”: nobody’s buying this shit anyway, Omar, just throw the curse into the title already) approached the kind of sound I imagine when I recall O.C.’s non-Preemo and non-“Time’s Up” joints. But that doesn’t make this one worth listening to, either: our host treads the same territory every other rapper has frequented for decades (who can I trust, not everyone is your friend, people are only after your money, etc.), but provides no new insight, daring to turn in in a song where the entire fucking thing is a cliché. How does that happen with the guy who wrote “Time’s Up”?

9. MEMORY LANE

Mislabeled on O.C.’s Bandcamp page: you, too, can listen to another not-so-rousing tale from Old Man Credle if you click on “Getaway”, which is a strange error to not have corrected by now. These stories all meander like tourists in Times Square that are constantly in your path, and again, he isn’t breaking any new ground, nor is he finding a different way to deliver the material: O.C. truly is just a more boring Nas at this point in his career, and with only a fifth of Nasir’s album budget to boot. (I’m not just making that comparison because Nas has a song called “Memory Lane” on his debut Illmatic, either.) I cannot stress enough how over it all our host has sounded on all of Starchild thus far, and Soul Supreme’s beat on “Getaway” “Memory Lane” is of the type that wouldn’t even make the final cut on a wannabe producer’s Soundcloud page. Ugh.

10. GETAWAY

So terrible that it made me consider retroactively changing my “Buy or Burn?” recommendations from Word… Life and Jewels to “skip this shit, O.C. won’t be worth it, just give it a couple more write-ups and you’ll see”. Only half-joking here, folks. Any hip hop heads out there that hold Starchild in high regard are dusted out of their motherfucking minds and shouldn’t be trusted.

11. SPECIAL

I’m running out of ways to explain how this shit is awful, but I can say this: at least Soul Supreme’s production on “Special” shows some signs of life. But it’s clear to me that Omar Credle was in a rut lyrically back in 2005: I’m almost positive the studio engineer fell asleep while O.C. recorded his bars. And that’s how I wrote a short paragraph about “Special” without going for an easy gag provided by the track’s own title.

12. WHO RUN IT? (REMIX)

Floyd da Locsmif somehow snagged an opportunity to remix his own work from the original take. However, O.C.’s performance is lifted directly from the first version, somehow fitting the newer instrumental even more awkwardly, so the entirety of my original review can be applied toward this remix. Welp, it's been a while since that’s happened during one of these write-ups.

13. OUTRO

Under normal circumstances, I’d be done by now. But these aren’t normal circumstances.

O.C.’s Bandcamp page features a deluxe reissue of Starchild, which includes three remixes unavailable on any other version of the project. (This is the same as the digital release on Amazon, by the way.)

14. 1NCE AGAIN (PETE ROCK REMIX)

Peter Q. Rockefeller’s redo of “1nce Again” swaps out the original’s outsourced vocal samples for… different outsourced vocal samples. But while the instrumental is an improvement over Soul Supreme’s work on the album version, it’s still barely passable, and it isn’t even recognizable as a Pete treat, as it features none of the typical Soul Brother flourishes we’ve all grown accustomed to. (Curiously, Soul Supreme’s original instrumental contains more horns than Pete Rock’s take, which seems sacrilegious somehow.) In fact, the music never switches up: it’s as though Pete looped up a four-bar segment of something he found buried on one of his laptops and sold it to our host for top dollar under the guise of, “hey, look, it’s a Pete Rock beat.” So, groan. It also doesn’t manage to make O.C. sound any more alert, so there’s no need for this to have ever been recorded. Yeah, I said it.

15. STORY TO TELL (COUNT BASS D REMIX)

Oh god, there’s two of these “Story To Tell” remixes on here. Awesome. Two additional opportunities to stave off blowing my brains out from sheer boredom. The performance from O.C. is exactly. The. God. Damn. Same. So don’t come here expecting any sort of redemption arc fulfillment. Count Bass D’s instrumental for this remake is kind of interesting, but not enough so to warrant you actually pressing ‘play’.

16. STORY TO TELL (!LLMIND REMIX)

Finally, almost done here. Producer !llmind, who has had a very good 2018 so far, if the sheer volume of his own tweets where he congratulates himself for his hard work paying off is any indicator, gives himself his own introduction, made up of a decent beat and scratched-in vocals, which makes it that much weirder when he brings in an entirely different instrumental for the actual remix, although one that is quite good. At least he matches the tempo of our host, whose delivery has, unsurprisingly, not started to sound any better with this third run-through. By mirroring Omar’s (lack of) energy, !llmind walks away with the best version of “Story To Tell” by default. But still, no.

THE LAST WORD: As hinted at multiple times throughout this post, Starchild is such a waste of time that one is left wondering why O.C. felt the need to commit these ideas to wax (relatively speaking) in the first place. If we stick with the “O.C. = Nas” narrative, Starchild is his Nastradamus: not only is it his fourth project as well, it’s also fucking terrible. The no-name producers behind the musical accompaniment try their hardest to mimic what our host has sounded good over in the past, but fail, not necessarily due to their level of talent (although they could have certainly used some more time practicing), but because Omar Credle took four fucking years to release a follow-up to Bon Appetit and still somehow rushed this to the Japanese market. Starchild is a mess: Credle sounds bored and unchallenged throughout, hitting the same notes as he has in the past while never evolving as an artist. Starchild is artistic regression converted into a digital file, and it plays as well as that description would imply. Run, don’t walk, away from this album, and for the love of fuck, please don’t pretend you enjoy Starchild more than you actually do just because you like O.C.: he has much better songs in his repertoire that deserve more exposure. Ugh.

-Max

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