Whitey Ford Sings The Blues

THIS WHOLE "Can Caucasians Rap?" claptrap is getting very tired. The US press might be having a field day over the fact that a new wave of white devils (Dr. Dre's boy Eminem, Remedy of the extended Wu-Tang Clan, Non Phixion) are moving in on the 'hood, but the race issue is as after-the-fact now as it was when The Stones and Led Zeppelin were committing grand larceny against Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon.

Besides, there's now a whole generation of American brats who came of age in an era when hip-hop was the dominant musical form. And if anything, the genre is inherently pancultural: everybody knows about 'Walk This Way' and the Beasties (let's forget Vanilla Ice for the moment), but this new phenomenon might just put paid to perceived differences between white trash and black pride aesthetics.

Interesting then, that - once you get under the skin of it - many of the tunes on ex-House Of Pain MC Everlast's solo debut draw as much from a good ol' boy background as bad B-boy culture. Gangly jams like the marvellous 'Ends' might invoke the hazy juju of the Clan, but they also recall Public Enemy hooking up with Stephen Stills last year, or Puerto Rican Paddy Huey Morgan sampling trailer-park stalwarts like Tom Petty and Lynyrd Skynyrd on the FLC LPs.

And, speaking of the Skynyrd, when Everlast sits on his porch with the acoustic and croaks out the dope folk of 'What It's Like', 'Today' and especially 'Guru', one can legitimately envision a point where rap goes cracker - as the album title suggests, blues is the root, and the beat was implicit even in Library of Congress recordings. Certainly, when the intro to '7 Years' quotes 'Hard To Handle', you figure many of the rapper's constituents will know it by The Black Crowes as much as Otis Redding.

Which is not to say Everlast doesn't rhyme hard on the more orthodox jams like 'Money (Dollar Bill)', 'Sen Dog' and the metal-infected 'Hot To Death', none of which would sully any streetwalker's blaster. Yet for an MC who made his mark with a bunch of cartoon republican yahoos ("Jump around!") and who offered as much insight into the Ulster condition as I have about Hell's Kitchen, his delivery resonates with a revivalist's sobriety. And if the guy sounds as serious as a heart attack, that's probably because he had one during the making of this album, the pay-off from a long-term condition. No surprise then, that even the most mischievous of tracks are informed by a grim moralism.

In conclusion, I'm tempted to resurrect the hookline from the Offspring single, but that tune lampooned a wanna-be, and Everlast just is.