The Unseen

Some vocalists might hear themselves on a recording and find themselves dissatisfied with the sound of their own voice. Few, if any, would make the same decision about it that Madlib did: take a bunch of mushrooms and record an album where he plays himself as a chipmunk-voiced, brick-wielding cartoon, a sort of Krazy Kat via “Funky Worm” Mothershipper Junie Morrison. As a “bad character” foil to his natural semi-deadpan baritone, Lord Quas followed in the steps of (and liberally sampled from) the cast of flawed-but-human archetypes in the early ’70s stage works of Melvin Van Peebles, three incarnations of beat poetry mingling together into hip-hop as a holistic exploration of the unknown and unheard — and inspiring listeners to ponder the question unseen by whom?