With Talkin' Honky Blues, the man who's been referred to as the 'hip-hop Tom Waits' created a concept/road-trip album of sorts, painting compelling portraits of strange, sketchy characters cut off from society, dwelling by the riverbed, seen through the eyes of a nomadic, non-comformist narrator who 'runs with the bulls and swims with the pool sharks'. As Christgau put it, "it's hip-hop, all right, only with vocals white as Hank Snow...dense, bassy beatbeds built the old-fashioned way, from handmade scratches and anonymous samples tweaked and tortured. These nods to tradition are overshadowed by his gravelly murmur, his Jimmy Stewart accent, his single steady cadence, his guitars without a trace of funk--and above all by his independence of hip-hop orthodoxy".
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