Party Fun Action Committee: Let's Get Serious

Hip-hop's crass materialism, inane posturing, and warped values make it an irresistible and imposing target for satire–after all, few pop stars are as ripe for parody as Ja Rule. But how can any satirist hope to compete with the hilarious, albeit unintentional, spoof of gangsta-rap posturing and 2Pac worship that constitutes Rule's career The Majesticons' Beauty Party recently satirized the surreal greed of mainstream rap, but the result was too abstract and theoretical to be funny. That's certainly not the case with Party Fun Action Committee's Let's Get Serious, an eclectic and far-ranging collection of goofy genre parodies from the wisenheimers at Definitive Jux. Conceptually, Let's Get Serious recalls The Turtles Present The Battle Of The Bands, a concept album on which the '60s rockers adopted the guises of often radically different groups while covering the gamut of musical genres. Let's Get Serious similarly finds Committee members Jer and Blockhead adopting personas as varied as The Mystical Knights Of The Vizual Roundtable, Flohamed Ali, and MC Noel Weissman. Ostensibly a collection of demos submitted to Bring The Rukus Records, Let's Get Serious takes on some easy targets, most enjoyably on "Be My Lady," which crossbreeds Nelly's horny nursery-rhyme style with Ja Rule's gangsta crooning. R. Kelly, frat boys, and rap-rock knuckleheads are similarly spoofed with malicious glee, but Let's Get Serious also takes aim at more obscure targets with tracks like the spot-on MC Paul Barman parody "Chapstick," and "Mental Storm," which satirizes lyricists who mistake polysyllabic vocabularies for intellectual depth. PFAC's uneven but inspired Let Get Serious is silly, self-indulgent, and sophomoric, and a whole lot of fun to boot.