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Have you ever been working on something — a painting, an essay, a drawing, a few lines of emo poetry, whatever — and suddenly, a song with vaguely related subject matter popped into your head? It happens to me all the time… I think it’s some kind of rare pox I caught from a dirty cassette tape when I was a kid. Unfortunately, there isn’t any cure for this nagging affliction. Worse still, the infection rate seems to be on the rise ever since holding a conversation with one iPod earbud in became socially acceptable.

Anyway, while I was drawing yesterday’s illustration, The Mighty Underdogs’ “Monster” crept into my brains and I was unable to chase it out. Now, this could have happened because I was scribbling a monstrous hand for a couple hours, or maybe it was just that I’ve been beating their album to a slow death over the past few weeks — I’ll leave it to the doctors to decide.

Gift of Gab and Lateef - photo by Joe Engle, via avclub.com

Of course, now that I’ve been writing about the song, it’s stuck in my head again. Common wisdom provides that listening to a song will exorcise its demonic, catching chords so, uh, let’s just fucking do that already.

For those who don’t know, The Mighty Underdogs is a side project of Gift of Gab from Blackalicious and longtime collaborator Lateef the Truthspeaker of Latyrx, with producer Headnodic on the boards. If you’ve done your alternative hip hop homework, those names alone should be enough to sell you. If not, just know that The Mighty Underdogs do hip hop the way it should be done — intelligent, fast, and rich with storytelling, all on top of beats that are fresh, creative, and occasionally trippy.

It’s basically a tossed salad of everything I like about music, and because it’s my website, you’re gonna have to eat it. So start digesting, my loyal subjects.