"This for the white people. All'a my white people. The 'never heard of DeLaSoul in your life' people" -Heath McNease

I spent the last half of 2012 soaking in the Wed White and Wu mixtape Heath recorded with Playdough, and concluded from the lyrics that Heath was a basketball player, probably a point guard. From the look of his new video Skibbidy Bibbidy (f/ Heir Jordan) the single off his new Jesus Shuttlesworth Mixtape, I'm thinking he might be a shooting guard...


The first time somebody said something to me about Heath McNease, I thought to myself "That has gotta be the whitest name in the world. I refuse to even listen to a rapper named Heath McNease..." Well, I eventually wound up doing the Wed, White and Wu cover art, so I listened to some YouTubery to get familiar with the guy... Lord have mercy, could this dude spit!


Besides having an alter-ego as a worship crooning heart-throb, Heath is a real student of the art of rapping. But where a lot of dudes master the form (multiple rhyme patterns, tongue-twisting word combinations, spitting at rapid speeds), Heath also infuses multiple layers of content into his rhymes (play on words, depth of meaning, double meanings, important/relevant subject matter). In short: not only is he a rapper, Heath McNease is a lyricist. He has something to say. Heath will make you laugh, maybe even cry. He'll make you think. He will make you respect the mother f***ing skills...
 

Anyways, Heath's first verse on You Know My Steez off Wed, White and Wu convinced me that he was a basketball player. 

 
"You can catch me at the Halls o' Justice,
Crossin' up cats til their balls are busted..." 
Halls of Justice = Courts = Where you play Basketball = mind/blown...
Heath's grips his basketballs again in the title of his new joint Jesus Shuttlesworth... The Mixtape, which is named after Ray Allen's character from the Spike Lee movie He Got Game. Besides sending mad white girls to Netflix tryin'a rent their first Spike Lee movie,  Shuttlesworth features Heath doing what Heath does: revealing bits of himself between clever samples and references to hip hop and pop-culture classics.


"And that's how you wrap it up.
Sing a song, and they say I don't rap enough.
I write a rap and they say I don't sing enough.
I stay holy and they say I don't swing enough.
I got no box. Got no genre.
Just a bunch of rapper friends that smoke ganja..."
from Don't Wake Daddy.

Heath gives a mix of slow and fast rhyming just to show he can, hitting a high point on the stretch where Don't Wake Daddy slides into Skibbidy Bibbidy (f/ Heir Jordan) and Norwegian Wood.  After listening to it once, I can say this mixtape is pretty dope. Heath raps over classic loops from the best days of mainstream rap, and does the soundscape justice. Like the best of McNease's rap catalog, Shuttlesworth is more fun than a barrel of monkeys. He has such a good time playing with words that you can't help but smile at his music, even when he's scolding you. It's worth the effort to go through this one and listen to the whole thing at least once. He's got the album available on some name-your-price type isht, so click here to cop it on bandcamp, and make sure to let me know which tracks you like best...


holla!
-samax.  

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