percee p, where are you?

For something like six years now, Stones Throw has been promising they’re going to release a proper full-length from the astonishing rapper Percee P. At first, I was thrilled — Percee is one of the most slept-on MC running, and his bootleg comp Legendary Status is one of the best hip-hop compilations I’ve ever heard.

I don’t want to sound all 25+ and cantankerous, but I’ve been bumming out over the dearth of lyrical dexterity in hip-hop lately. Most backpack rappers leave me cold (too academic, too joyless, not enough knots in the verse or sweat in the flow), and while I totally back both T.I. and Lil Wayne, they seem to be two exceptions in a market overcrowded with songs built from bloopy production and a couple easy imperatives (“Make it rain!” “Walk it out!”). Percee works for me because he is a master of the internal rhyme scheme — he crams several hundred homophonic syllables into a single verse, hammering them all with force and conviction.

Percee’s album doesn’t seem any closer to release than, say, Detox, and I strongly suspect the issues lie more with the artist than the label (Percee, from what I gather, has a tendency to procrastinate). In the meantime, the video for this Madlib-produced track is an appetite whetter, evidence that when it does drop, it will not disappoint: