Rating: 3.5/5 Released: 2007 Reviewer: Trent McMartin

“Bush is a drug dealer, Cheney is a criminal / White House, bloodthirsty, actin’ like animals”, proclaims guest rapper MF Grimm on Noticeably Negro’s second track, “Cauc’s Remix.” It turns out this is only one of the few sporadic insertions of Mos Def-like thought provoking racial, political and socio-economic subject matter on the album. The rest of the record pertains to more abstract connotations (E.G. “Puppies and Dogs”) and spaced out sonic landscapes, following a more underground blueprint than the pop orientated mainstream rap of today.

Still, Serengeti does occasionally reference the streets and the typical themes that accompany that topic - booty, gratuitous drug use and gun play. But instead of glorifying in the first person, the Chicago rapper usually puts things in nonfigurative terms, never sounding boastful or vengeful, sometimes using satirical humor to get his point across.

Only on the album’s title track do things get personal as Serengeti tackles the superficial importance put upon racial identity and physical appearances. A black man, Serengeti himself has had to deal with countless inquiries of his race, and as if to humorously poke fun at the situation he ends the song by saying, “Yeah, man, I’m like half Korean and half Camel, and I got some Zebra, and um, a small, small part of Reptile, and the rest is Native American.”

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