Skip to main content"If I just said 'fuck dividers,' does that sound like I want to talk about them? No. I've said all I need to say about them." These lines ring out like a shot as the opening salvo of Prefuse 73's Surrounded By Silence, "I've Said All I Need To Say About Them." The speaker might be Prefuse creator Scott Herren, but it's hard to say. Like many of the cut-up samples the hip-hop producer manipulates to create his beat-heavy audio collages, it's unattributed. The song's narrator continues: "Whatever, shit. When you play some shit, and someone is inspired to get off their ass and do something positive, that's some shit, right?"
The explicit meaning of this audio clip is clear: Stop hating and start doing. But it's also a warning Herren issues to a fanbase that started with the first Prefuse album, 2001's Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives, and grew considerably with 2003's One Word Extinguisher. The warning? "You're not going to like this." And for much of the album, he's right.
"I think people are just impatient," Herren says on the phone from Chicago. "I mean, this album is one album, the last one was another album, the one before that was different. And the next one is gonna be completely different."
Herren has earned a reputation and an audience by deconstructing hip-hop production, inverting the usual structure by turning the MC into little more than another component of the music. While producers and DJs have always had a high profile in the world of hip-hop-from Dr. Dre to the Neptunes to Kanye West-they were always backing up an ego with a mic. Herren changed the role of the MC by focusing the spotlight on the production itself. He created songs that downsized the ego in hip-hop by cutting up his MC's words. He worked verbal scraps into his textured tracks, as if they were just another oddball music sample or glitchy beat. Prefuse 73 was hip-hop for those who loved the sound but needed a break from the posturing. For about half of Surrounded By Silence, his latest, Herren holds to this new tradition with some of his most masterful cut-ups, including one of his best so far, "Pagina Dos."
The rest of the tracks, though, have more ego than the Detroit Pistons, Herren's guest stars upstaging his curious compositions with their personalities out front and on display. Basically, these tracks sound like regular old hip-hop; not bad, but not really Prefuse 73.
When Herren and his band take the stage Wednesday night at Berbati's Pan, though, it will be as the familiar Prefuse 73. Without his crew of collaborators on stage, Herren will avoid delving into his recent experimentation with the non-experimental.
"I don't want to do anything cheesy," he says.
That should please the dividers.
Prefuse 73 plays with Battles and Beans Wednesday, May 18, at Berbati's Pan, 10 SW 3rd Ave., 248-4579. 9 pm. $15. 21+.
WWeek 2015