Beans

According to Anti-Pop Consortium's Beans, Tomorrow Right Now is the first part of "a three-sided idea" that will continue with Now is Now and If Not Now, Then When? But, for now, it might be best to think of his debut as a continuation of APC's last release, Arrhythmia, since the group is now defunct. Both albums contain spaced-out keyboard funk, bleeps and blips, experimental sounds, and intense wordplay. "This is stuff I was working on even when I was in Anti-Pop," Ball Beans says of the inevitable comparison. "It just came to fruition after the break-up. It's the context of where I'm from," explains Beans, who was with APC for eight years. Free to vent without a veto from APCers Priest and M. Sayyid, Beans jumped behind the boards with help from Earl Blaize and two other engineers, got more abstract with the raps, and brought poetry to the forefront. Aside from songs like "Phreek the Beet," "Raping Silence" and "Mutescreamer," which could easily be part of the future funk of Arrhythmia, Beans laments on the current state of hip-hop affairs over a simple beat-box for "Crave," and breaks out the spoken word Beat poetry for the anti-drug "Booga Sugar," dating back to '93 or '94. "It's a reflection of my work," he explains. "[Poetry] allowed me the room to experiment without the crutch of being so dependent on a beat." While Beans does succeed on Tomorrow Right Now without the rest of Anti-Pop Consortium, it's difficult not to miss the influences and voices of the other members of one of hip-hop's most fearless groups.