It’s nearly impossible to talk about music in Houston without delving into hip-hop, yet somehow we’ve managed to do a pretty good job avoiding the genre until now. Truth is, we love the rap in town, we just think it gets plenty of press everywhere else, and would never describe our taste in it as anything but purely celebratory and driven almost entirely by the enormous media culture that has made hay off of it for years now. We can’t listen to mainstream rock radio for more than few minutes without getting very frustrated, but at the same time there isn’t a sound system loud enough to express our guiltless love of Kelly Rowland’s “Like This.” While we may spend nearly all our listening time pouring over the latest releases from the indie scene, to us there is still no more essential (and, ironically, removed from our own experience) artistic statement summarizing Houston than Scarface’s “My Block.” Take a second and let it sink in that the excitement of finding a copy of H-town punks The Freshmaker’s 1996 7″ at Trader’s Village on Saturday was completely undone by our not being able to locate a single Pimp C shirt at Sharpstown Mall in a size smaller than XXL that same afternoon.

So, while we’ve spent more time than we would care to admit digging ever deeper into the guitars hiding in Houston’s Bayous, aside from an unintended live encounter with folks like Perseph One or Noasprise, we’ve entirely taken what the mainstream has served us up from the rap game. We freely admit that this is probably a mistake; that walling off talent like The F%cking Transmissions or Fat Tony simply because we think Mattsoreal or Lance Walker have a better perspective from which to approach their work was a clumsy combination of apathy and keeping focused on what we we feel we’re better at writing about. Besides, if we start approaching hip-hop critically, it seems like it would take some of the fun out of it. But there is something about B L A C K I E’s work that does hit that MUST RAMBLE FOR PARAGRAPHS nerve inside us. Rather than being all gangster or diva or people’s champ about it, his work approaches the rap game as not just an institutional, but a musical outsider. His latest, Wilderness of North America, sounds nothing like the big Bentley pop tracks we love fom the genre - it’s like nothing we’ve ever really heard and at times pan-handles the question, how far can you stray from the conventional pillars of a genre and still be considered part of it?

Wilderness is rap for the Future Blondes crowd both sonically and structurally. Like the songs on Unity Pure/1111, the sound palette marries up heavily distorted beats, clean subsonics and piercing trebles, washing out clean edges for linty extremities wired into your ears only after a massive deconstruction of the source material. It’s an absolutely atypical collection of pet sounds to be stitched together for a hip hop composition. Even samples of such pop-music heavyweights as Abba’s “The Name of the Game” and Cat Steven’s “Wild World” do nothing to inch their respective tracks closer to the banger club anthem school of hip hop that lies miles to the south of Wilderness. These samples are telling - they’re perfect T-Pain ringtone fodder, but in B L A C K I E’s hands they’re stuffed into the composition jarringly rather than being the hook around which the tracks (”That’s Right” and “B L A C K I E… Is Still Alive”) are built. Indeed, there’s nothing a hook in any of these compositions.

If B L A C K I E’s production is expectation-busting, it doesn’t end with the rapping itself. The rhymes are straightforward and urgent, often pushing forward with little regard for the metronome and generally not delving into the clever wordplay devices that are the hallmarks of the genre. The lyrics have a socially conscious weight to them - this isn’t spittin diction about bitches, riches and syrup. Often whats being communicated is hard to make out, with B L A C K I E’s vocals sometimes finding themselves drowning in too much reverb and echo. But the two parts, the beats and the rhymes and how they are produced, have a unified sound that works well together, even if at times we wish for a little less sonic cohesion and a little little less straining to hear what he’s saying.

The album is consistently inconsistent, but deliberately and not halfassedly. There are four tracks that clock in under two minutes, and two instrumentals. On some of the tracks, the beats are regular, even they vanish entirely into the whirl, while on others you find a dizzying irregularly, like “Caught Lost”, who’s synth pad, sine waves, staccato snares and big crashing cymbals bring to mind the approach to songwriting of Endtroducing era DJ Shadow. It’s a short album, clocking in at under half and hour, and one that will likely give you that shotgun butt to the head reminder than rap is not a monolitic genre - that there is an underground there as well doing interesting things periphery. Things you might find yourself surprised to be recommending.

Catch B L A C K I E at the Free Press Recession Thursday show August 28th at Numbers. Also on the bill are The Mathletes, Giant Princess and The Goods. In the meantime you can order a copy of Wilderness In North America from his MySpace.