During the early stages of the 2000s, when popular music’s vernacular was strangely led by an over-saturated white-boy-hip-hop clatter, one-hit wonders and New Jersey duo, Little T and One Track Mike, released “Shaniqua,” a comic riff about a wrong phone number. MTV spun the track feverishly, which, oddly, jettisoned the hip-hop duo into a fatal disappearing act. That said, Little T disembodied himself from his moniker, renamed himself Tim Fite, signed with Anti- (a diverse record label with a roster that boasts Tom Waits and Billy Bragg and which released Elliot Smith’s posthumous final album), and embraced an eccentric, genre-hopping sound stewing with cultural and political enlightenment, experimental flutters of bargain-bin sampled noise, and authentic folk arrangements.
Over its course, the spasmodic Fair Ain’t Fair, Fite’s third album, ebbs between genres so flauntingly, yet so fluently, climaxing into a riotous motley of musical oddities. Still, on Fair Ain’t Fair, Tim Fite has emerged as an inimitable artist who waxes experimental hip hop and a kind of frenetic anti-folk with an omnipresent kick-drum-snare stomp as every song teems with his signature bite.
On the tracks “Roots Of A Tree,” “Rats and Rags,” “Heaven is War,” “More Clothes,” and the heartrending “Harriet Tubman,” Fite rediscovers themes of inequities and over-consumption, themes heavily examined on his critically acclaimed second album, Over the Counter Culture, released free through his Web site. On “Big Mistake,” arguably Fair Ain’t Fair’s catchiest song, Fite, in a mode of self-reflexivity, comically sings, “Tell me a dirty joke, and I’ll laugh it off lightly / If I tell you a dirty joke, you may not like me,” as a steady acoustic guitar raises the song into a sing-along.
While the ambitious Fair Ain’t Fair and much of Fite’s catalogue may swarm with an overt examination of cultural and political decay, Fite’s tongue-in-cheek lyrical stream of consciousness and droll wordplay transcends Fair Ain’t Fair’s heavy themes into an ambitious, genre-defying album of propulsive beats, obscure samples, and hook-laden folk melodies.
|