All rappers brag about where they come from, and David Banner is no exception. His new CD is called Mississippi: The Album, and on it he spends more than an hour extolling the virtues of his home state. On one song, the vein-popping club track "Might Getcha," he even offers a helpful spelling guide: "We from the M-i, crooked-letter crooked-letter i, crooked-letter crooked-letter i, humpback humpback i."

Banner grew up in Jackson and spent time with his grandparents an hour south, in Brookhaven, and he doesn't hesitate to claim the region's musical legacy as his own. "You have to understand that the blues is the foundation for all contemporary music," he says, and his album backs up the boast. It starts with lots of screaming and slow-rolling beats, but then there's "Cadillac on 22's," a moaning gospel lament that wraps a thin synthesizer beat in acoustic guitar.

You probably wouldn't expect a song named after car rims to include a soliloquy about whether or not hell exists, but that's just the kind of thing that makes Mississippi: The Album so exciting. One minute Banner is inciting a nightclub riot ("If that nigga in the club and y'all wanna beat him up/Point that nigga out!"), the next he's lambasting President Bush's foreign policy: "This all 'bout oil/Y'all fake like fronts that's filled with foil."

When asked about his scattershot approach, Banner says it's a product of -- guess what -- growing up in Mississippi. A cousin who was a DJ turned him on to Mantronix and Stetsasonic, but he got a lot of his musical education from MTV, which helped give him both his taste for rock & roll and his trademark sneer. "The expression that I have on my face comes from Billy Idol, 'White Wedding,' " he says.

Banner's former group, Crooked Lettaz, released an under-appreciated debut, Grey Skies, in 1999; he also self-released a ferocious solo album, Them Firewater Boyz, Vol. 1, the next year. Now things are looking up -- Mississippi: The Album debuted at Number Nine on the Billboard charts, thanks mainly to "Like a Pimp," a woozy hit that features the Houston rapper Lil' Flip. Still, Banner isn't exactly giddy with excitement. "Right now, I'm at the most critical point of my career," he says. "Yeah, you can get that one hit, but can you get that second one?"

It's still possible that Banner will fall through the cracks, of course -- not sweet enough for the mainstream, not earnest enough for the underground. But he has a pretty good Plan B: He's "one semester and one thesis" away from earning a master's degree in education at the University of Maryland. And like any smart hip-hop businessman, he has noticed a niche waiting to be filled. "If you look at these Harvards and Yales," he says, "they got classes on hip-hop, but no rappers qualified to teach."

KELEFA SANNEH
(July 15, 2003)