4 out of 5

Label: Rhymesayers

Produced by: Brother Ali

This is impressive. I say this as a fan of Brother Ali, but not really his early stuff. Shadows on the Sun and The Undisputed Truth, to me, show an artist trying to establish a sound; though clearly bursting with flow and wordplay skill, Shadows was backpackery ruled over by Atmosphere-influenced beats, and Undisputed Truth feels like Ali poking and prodding at different modes without fully committing to them. Some great singles, and the confidence in the presentation is there, I just don’t return to them as often as later albums, on which I feel the artist truly started establishing his own, fully realized sound.

So: Rites of Passage, the wholly self-produced cassette that appeared three years before Shadows in a low, 300-copy run – I’d expect this to be a rawer version of that album, picking up on the Minnesota sound with, probably, some battle-hardened ‘tude baked in. And it’s not not that, but left to his own devices, Ali lays out his future as one of the best MCs of his generation: a keen ear for rhythm and variation; a balance of narrative and bravado; and an overwhelmingly accepting and humble mood, the ‘grounding’ that makes his tracks work whether they’re party jams, love tracks, or political screeds, and whether paired with superstars like Jake One, or here, making his own, 90s-era stripped down beats. The difference I hear is stark, between a rapper who absolutely grabs your attention and demands awaiting his next release, and the next couple discs where Ali’s sound can maybe be boiled down to being a Rhymesayers dude. That’s dismissive, but it’s more meant to establish Shadows as the sophomore release – and thus somewhat of a slump – versus this stunning debut.

The album title is solid. Ali is handed the torch of having rapped throughout his youth, and now turns it into reality. The production is very much a lo-fi affair, but I live off the roughness of it, and there’s a surprising amount – given what must’ve been a low budget production – of flourish to it. Variation also abounds on this release, as well as smarts with the sequencing, putting some bangers up towards the front of each side of the cassette, but linking the sides with Music In My Head (an instrumental) and Voices In My Head (a chill mix of samples) at the end and start of sides A and B, respectively. In the middle of each half, Ali hands a track fully over to another MC – Desdemona and Queen Aminah – and then fills in the rest of the spaces with street-level tales of life and living.

Regarding the latter, that is where we get a sense of Ali’s youth at this point. Though still, at this point, leagues ahead of lyricists even in comparison to his present day peers – crafting rhymes that are coherent and not repetitive, poetic but sensible – the subject matter is simply less wizened than where he’d eventually take it, and covers some ground that’s a bit more generic. Ali’s rapping style also slips into stuff representative of the era in backpack rap, which was overly talky (think early Aesop, Atmopshere, Eyedea), and though I praised the flow changeups of Desdemona’s and Queen Aminah’s tracks, they also sound especially young here, and more in line with what we’d expect first releases to sound like. But these are the exceptions to the rule of how otherwise damned impressive the album is, and how clear it made the case for Ali being a mainstay and influence in the scene in the years to come.

If you had the CD version of this, you got a couple bonus tracks – The Phoenix with Musab is a rave-up, and Eighty-8 with BK One is a kind of lighthearted scribble; both kind of don’t fit on the album, but are definitely each worth a listen.