Midnight Marauders; Jive Records

Most likely, it started last summer when Grand Puba's first solo single was slammin', and it appeared that he was going to be one of the all time great hip-hop artists. But then his album came out, and it was undeniably weak. Things haven't been the same since.

Hip-hop music is in the midst of one its longest creative dry spells since its birth in 1975. The past year has not produced a single album which could be called truly influential or innovative.

(There are possible exceptions. De La Soul's Buhloone Mindstate and the Pharcyde's Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde come to mind. But De La has always worked on the fringes, and their ability to influence the hip-hop community is limited. I'll get to the Pharcyde later.)

The last two albums to generate real excitement were A Tribe Called Quest's Low End Theory and Cypress Hill's Cypress Hill. Since then, a rash of albums have been put out by groups more adept at marketing concepts than they are at music.

Onyx, House of Pain and Kriss Kross (I won't even get into the whole West Coast "gangsta" genre) have little to offer to people who think hip-hop means more than just wearing baggy pants and jumping around. And when Cypress Hill's latest album Black Sunday marked their full transformation from edgy hip-hop innovators into cartoonish potheads, A Tribe Called Quest seemed to be one of the last hopes for the hip-hop nation.

Unfortunately, Quest's new album Midnight Marauders doesn't quite come through. It's not so bad that it's time for complete despair, but then again its many good parts don't point out new directions for the music to take.

Musically, Midnight Marauders the high quality established on Quest's previous two albums. Wisely, they lay off the jazz sound which has been so hyped recently in favor of stripped down, funkier tracks.

The mellower songs like "Electric Relaxation" and "The Chase, Part II" make good use of cheesy keyboard samples to achieve a laid-back feel. More ominous sounding songs like "8 Million Stories" and "Midnight" use samples which sound like the music that would come on during the serious parts of the Fat Albert show. All of the songs keep you bobbing your head, at least for a while.

However, lyrically, the album is a step down from the previous two. The first two tracks, "Steve Biko (Stir It Up)" (which has nothing to do with South Africa) and "Award Tour," seem to promise more of the same lyrical skill and complexity Q-Tip and Phife have shown in the past.

Phife starts out the album declaring "Linden Boulevard represent, represent/Tribe Called Quest represent, represent/When the mike is in my hand, I'm never hesitant/ Back in the day my favorite jam was `Eric B. Is President."' On "Award Tour," Q-Tip claims, "I learned how to build mikes in my workshop class."

But things quickly go downhill. Phife doesn't have the depth to pull off the downbeat "8 Million Stories." And for someone who calls himself "The Abstract Poet," Q-Tip is awfully descriptive and boring on tracks like "Sucka Nigga" and "Midnight."

Usually one of hip-hop's most creative lyricists, you'd think Q-Tip could come up with a better line for the chorus of "Sucka Nigga" than "My style is kind of fat, reminiscent of a whale."

The rhymes don't get better until near the end of the album with "Keep It Rollin'" where Phife, singing the Barney theme song, makes up for all his ramblings about basketball and R&B singers earlier. He sort-of-sings, "I love you, you love me, the Shorty Phife Dawg is your favorite MC."

Q-Tip follows with, "Check it out because my conception is immaculate/I'm a bachelor lookin' for a bachelorette."

There are interesting bits throughout the album, especially the Midnight Marauder tour guide, a computerized female voice over silly music, who makes random declarations between songs.

For example, at one point she says, "A Tribe Called Quest consist of four members--Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammed, Q-Tip, and Jarobi. A-E-I-O-U." That doesn't answer the question of what Jarobi does in the group, but it keeps you on your toes.

If only a couple of the weaker songs were replaced by more solid tracks, Midnight Marauders would have been a great album. But as it is, it's merely good and that's not enough.

For now, hip-hop's true creative center has moved out to the West Coast where groups like the Pharcyde and Freestyle Fellowship in Los Angeles and Del the Funkee Homosapien and Souls of Mischief in Oakland are exploring new ground. The more established New York groups have grown complacent, and that could be hip-hop's death knell.