Everlast – White Trash Beautiful
Previous attempts to blend hip-hop and country-rock have ranged from the amusing (Kid Rock) to the embarrassing (Bubba Sparxxx), but now someone has finally done it right. There’s nothing gimmicky about Everlast’s new album; he’s blending the genres not to be cute but to serve the fistful of terrific songs he’s written.
Just as Gram Parsons once added rock guitar to country to add a modern edge to his songs of heartbreak and homesickness, now Everlast adds Eric B. & Rakim samples to his twangy tales of truck stops and trailer parks. Just as Neil Young once added hillbilly touches to his rock songs to lend them an adult vulnerability, now Everlast adds acoustic guitars and confessional lyrics to his b-boy grooves.
The opening track, “Blinded By The Sun”, describes the singer meeting a West Virginia woman who asks for a ride to New York. But as she explains how she impulsively killed her cheating boyfriend back in Atlanta, he finds himself torn between desire and wariness and begins to question his own impulses. Everlast sings the story over an acoustic guitar in the gravelly baritone of a Johnny Cash and even quotes Neil Young, but the track is built atop the muscular rhythms of a Run-DMC sample.
On the title track, he describes a pregnant woman who lives in a trailer park and works in a diner while she waits for her truck-driving husband to come home. The lyric details are apt — the waitress name tag slightly askew, her photo wedged in the corner of his rearview mirror — and the theme of economic pressures keeping young lovers apart is pure country. But as that pressure increases, the drum loops grow louder and overtake the acoustic-guitar arpeggios.
Everlast (a House Of Pain alumnus born Erik Schrody) defies the biggest taboo in rap by dropping the macho pose to acknowledge his failed relationships and crumbled dreams. He gets away with it because he never whines and always accepts his share of the blame. He rewrites Hank Williams'”I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” into “This Kind Of Lonely”, mixing steel guitar and drum machine, contemplating his own role in his recent divorce, and fashioning a new kind of honky-tonk lament for a new age.