DJ Rap
Learning Curve
Columbia Records

If you're a frustrated little raver looking for simple drum and bass music complete with sophomoric lyrics even you can understand, this is the album for you. DJ Rap says of her music, "this is not for the conventional person that just wants coffee-table music. This is for people that want to go into something. I'd like it to be like a trip, I'd like to be able to take people away. Surrealisim, that's what I'm really into." My guess is, her music would be borderline trippy if you were dancing in a strobe light and all tore-up on mescaline. DJ Rap's manifesto of surreal expression and ethereal, mind altering, acid house beatification is detailed in all its glory on Learning Curve. The result is a record deeply rooted in the purely affirmational and never confrontational cutesyness of the purest pop music, a style triumphant in songs like "Live it for Today", and "Good to be Alive." If that's what you're into, you're gonna think this is a great record. (It actually sounds a whole lot like Madonna's new attempts at whatever it is that she's attempting.) In the final analysis, this U.K. import has produced an album of near misses and almost embarrassing lyrical taboos. Two-fifths erect.

-Jason Kirkmeyer

One of the great things about techno was that the artist as star was always put in the back seat in favor of the music. They were not Stars in any traditional sense. But what was once an underground movement has become mainstream. And anything moving into the mainstream needs stars. DJ Rap is a woman, she is beautiful, she does not rap, she will be a star.

DJ Rap has been spinning jungle/breakbeat sounds in Europe for ten years and has been cranking out dance hits there for almost as long. Charissa Saverio (real name) has left her jungle roots behind her and composed an album of amazingly accessible feminist techno/pop. She lets her flag wave on the first track Bad Girl, "I'm Trying to show you as friends we'd get along/respect my body 'cos that's where you came from."

This album has a nice pop sheen over a drum and bass backing track. Don't let it scare you, though. It has something for everyone. Big phat beats that will rattle the best pair of woofers, plenty of pop hooks, and if you liked Madonna's Ray of Light this is the next logical step into the techno world. Techno purists will probably hate this record, but it is a good starting point for those who would like to see what all the fuss is about.

-Tommy S.

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