Buttery Lords Buttered For Her Pleasure (self-released)

By Casey Jarman

[SILLY RAP] What kind of hip-hop crew are the Buttery Lords? Well, they drop two Neil Diamond references on their re-issued debut, Buttered for Her Pleasure. The comedic rap outfit also weaves Trotsky, Howard Zinn, Pauly Shore and local bar Beulahland into its rhymes, along with plenty of bygone pop-culture references and clever lines: 'I'm crazy like Sid Barrett'; 'I'll even make you sadder than Robert Smith'; 'You can't spell butter without the butt/ Say what?/ Churn it up.' Unfortunately, when it comes to rhyme schemes, the Buttery Lords seem to have stopped listening to hip-hop with the Sugar Hill Gang. Each of the group's three 'funky honkees'—one of which is folk-pop songwriter Leigh Marble (the Lords' Dr. Marble)—has a wacky persona, executed with varying degrees of success, but none of them has come close to mastering phrasing or flow.

Why should a satirical group with the line 'I'm gonna unify your Germany like Helmut Kohl' care about phrasing or flow? Because the 'white rapper' gag in itself hasn't worked for years, and satire should have at its disposal all the weapons of the art form it's satirizing. When it comes to busting rhymes, the Lords just don't. If these emcees could get their timing and delivery on par with their knack for smart/dirty humor (which is more mature and irreverent than most bands in the joke-rap genre), shit could get pretty intense.

I say this not just because the Lords are clever, but because they have a live rhythm section that makes the music sound, appropriately, quite creamy. The band's real live drums and bass are well-played and indispensable to its formula. The instrumentation also spares the Lords the potential pitfall of crafting their own cheesy 808 beats, and it grants them the ability to put subtle twists on their stolen bass lines (like that of Berlin's 'Take My Breath Away' on the Lords' 'Hometowns').

In a genre that's so easily done wrong (see Rappin' Rodney, Chunky A, the Kottonmouth Kings), the Buttery Lords don't fare too poorly on Buttered for Her Pleasure. It's pretty funny stuff (the off-the-cuff 'commentary tracks' are often funnier than the album itself)—and surprisingly funky for part-time basement rappers. If they're going to put this much work into it, though, they should probably just go ahead and learn how to rap.

The Buttery Lords officially release Buttered for Her Pleasure Sunday, Dec. 5.


WWeek 2015

Casey Jarman

Casey Jarman

Casey Jarman is a freelance editor and writer based in East Portland, Oregon. He has served as Music Editor at Willamette Week and Managing Editor at The Believer magazine, where he remains a contributing editor. He is currently working on his first book. It's about death.

Willamette Week’s reporting has real-life impact that changes laws, forces action by civic leaders, and drives compromised politicians from public office.

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