Maybe you missed the Perfecto album. I spent last summer obliterating the Chicago media softball league with Kenny Dennis and still didn’t realize the self-titled hip-house spawn of Snap and Technotronic had ever seen release. It should be on our year-end lists but it isn’t. We aren’t afraid of losing ourselves to the rhythm, but we are afraid of oversight. This is one of those instances.
Mike Eagle once told me that Serengeti is the platonic art-rap ideal. He didn’t use those exact words because Mike is less pretentious than I, but the point still stands. Who else on earth could create a character like Kenny Dennis and then pursue the muse through paeans to rib tips and Steve Bartman, to ersatz 90s boom-bap concept records to an absurd florescent synth-rap opus done with Ders from Workaholics? Kenny Dennis is to Chicago as Faulkner is to Yoknapatawpha County. He’s the closest thing hip-hop has to Christopher Guest, but with far more heart.
We’re premiering a few sketches today to help you understand the backstory of the Perfecto album. The first finds the album’s fictional producer, DJ Rafal explaining how he went from systems engineer at a carton factory to being the best producer since AB Logic. It chronicles the nine years he spent writing a 9,000+ page book at his day job. The time he put his beats up on Craigslist and how they were discovered by Kenny, who immediately shared them with Ders. The two started rapping and never stopped.
I’d tell you more about trials and travails of their mall tour, but if you don’t know, then you should probably purchase Perfecto. Ask yourself, what would Ya Kid K do?
