Lost Art comes home from La La Land

PHOTO by JEFF GOULD

Rapper Lost Art might be taking the name from the way he grew up—born in Long Beach and from then on split-second stints every single city in Orange County that kept him perpetually disoriented till the age of majority. “How it affected me? Shit—I don’t have any friends I really grew up with,” he says. “All my friendships are established since I was 18. I know so many people without knowing them, you know?” As constants come, he had a grandmother in Santa Ana and a hip-hop collection that started with gangsta rap he’d buy at various Towers and—after he heard “Can I Kick It?”—reassembled itself around every golden-era bona-fide each coast would produce. And so his new third album Lost Articles: Escape From La La Land grants a little salute to each: thirteen tracks of heartfelt verses and a kid’s-eye-view of the Santa Ana water tower on the cover. Maybe you could call it a homecoming. Or—though it’s his third full-length—an introduction.

Articles—another respectable entry in local hip-hop collective Technicali’s discography, sitting nicely alongside fellow travelers LD and Ariano, LMNO, 2MEX and Hochii—was finished by inches, Art says now as he’s preparing the Long Beach release party for an album whose first single (“I Gotta Rhyme”) was sliding out in August of 2006 but which won’t be completely official until this weekend. In between—and with a break when Art had a daughter—he and principal producer LD cut and recut about 40 tracks, sifting weekly to make Lost Articles what Art calls “an emotional rollercoaster!” The two years of woodshedding—like taping reference freestyles in LD’s living room when the usual garage studio was temporarily out of commission—led to a little luxurious experimentation, Art says.

LD yanked everything but the Sedaka sample from “I Gotta Rhyme” and replaced it with live instrumentation, a Roots-y move matched by the 70-plus bar freestyle (also inspired by Black Thought, says Art, though it sounds closer to Organized Konfusion) re-recorded as the “Dynamic Bullies” after a few tiny corrections. With LD, says Art, “we can go in with nothing—a blank canvas—and he’ll find a sample he likes and tailor it to the keys, and then produce around it and remove it, and while he’s doing that I’m writing. And then we can record it.”

LD’s production—already preternaturally accomplished enough to rank production work with GZA, Kool G Rap, Black Milk and Prince Po—climbs up a level on Lost Articles, especially on the inside-outted “Gotta Rhyme,” which approaches vintage Dre with its persistent melody and g-funk low end. Technicali associate Trek Life turns in a standout cameo—agile offbeat/onbeat verses like prime Masta Ace or Sadat X—and Lost Art tests out a few different styles on songs like the rattling competition-speed “Life is a Battle,” the spaced-out spiel “Dynamic Bullies” and the why-we-fight anthem “Rhyme,” which lays out some of the self-analysis that Technicali has never been shy about. Songs like “Settin Up Shop,” “Rhyme” and “Lab Meditations”—with Ariano unrolling his usual especially weathered sort of authority—dissect the inner and outer life of the hip-hop MC; it’s a topic that can be as big or as small as the author makes it, but Lost Articles matches soul to the solipsism.

He hopes—he says humbly—to be as much poet as B-boy, but he wants to pace himself, too. There are large parts of his life that aren’t on this album of songs about writing songs, he says—but that’s because this is just a first step. He’s still thinking about the next place he’ll settle down for a while: “For now, I just want them used to me—what I bring lyrically,” he says. “Then we’ll start making people cry!”

THE LOST ART AT THE RELEASE PARTY FOR THE LOST ARTICLES: ESCAPE FROM LA LA LAND WITH LMNO, LD AND ARIANO, HOCHII AND TREK LIFE PLUS OPTIMIST, JBIZNESS, ELOKWENT AND DAHLIAM THE BLUE CAFE | 210 THE PROMENADE | LONG BEACH 90802 | FRI 9PM | $12 WITH FREE CD INCLUDED | 21+ | THEBLUECAFE.COM AND THELOSTARTMUSIC.COM

Tags: hip hop, Long Beach, lost art, Music, Santa Ana, the blue cafe