Baby Elephant
Turn My Teeth Up!
Godforsaken Music
Rating: 
Baby Elephant, a collaboration between Prince Paul, Newkirk and Bernie Worrell, sounds like a relic from the late 80s and/or 90s. Several veterans of New York’s No Wave/synth-funk scene, from David Byrne and Nona Hendryx to George Clinton, make cryptic and random appearances. Scotty Hard, a key member of the late, lamented Wordsound camp, toils behind the scenes as an engineer. And the mighty Newkirk, a cult figure from the golden era of hip-hop, serves as a co-producer on Turn My Teeth Up! (Remember his game show host on De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising?)
With such an eclectic roster, not to mention master conceptualist Prince Paul at the helm, Turn My Teeth Up is bound to be a deeply eccentric album. If only its cast had made more dynamic music. Most of these tracks, while pleasing, bear the same shuffling keyboard funk that spreads like a broken glass of soda. Ostensibly part homage to Worrell, the keyboardist behind the P-Funk machine — one skit, “Master,” finds Prince Paul and Newkirk traveling “from a distant land” to learn from him — it stomps along at a heavy, sluggish pace like … a baby elephant. One notable exception is “Fred Berry,” a bubbly funk jumper that takes its cues from the 60s and the Junior Walker All-Stars.
Other highlights include “How Does the Brain Wave,” which is wrapped in Byrne’s gauzy New Wave vocals, and the gripping “Crack Addicts in Love.” On the latter, Hendryx sings, “The moon, the sun is shaped like guns/Atoms exploding in the mind/Above the sound/The sound of a death cry.” Turn My Teeth Up may be a little boring, but you can’t say that it lacks imagination.
