rt Bell: We are the slaves of extraterrestrial visitors. Slaves. We were created to dig for gold - to mine for gold - for the Anounakki. Now -


Unidentified Man: In the beginning.


Art Bell: In the beginning, yes. But now, we are unravelling the human genome. As you said, we are getting very close. Just a few more years. And my question, Zachariah, is: When we do unravel it and we begin to modify our own genetic structure and use more of our brains and cure our sicknesses, the next time the Anounakki come back, they're going to be rather surprised, aren't they?


Unidentified Man (Zachariah): I don't think so, because in the beginning, indeed, they just needed us for manpower - creating us as hybrids - and then through a second genetic manipulation - which is the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden - gave us the ability to procreate. But after the flood, after the deluge they treated us as partners, not as workers for them, not as slaves, and started to give us knowledge. We call it civilization.


This snippet of bizarre, conspiratorial dialogue was not transcribed from the radio, it was not emailed to me. It was taken from a track on Buck 65's most recent album, and my pick for the most amazing hip-hop album of 2001, Man Overboard.


Buck 65 mines the same territory as many of his Anticon brothers - truly alternative hip-hop. The rhymes are thoughtful and are delivered naturally and off-kiltered. There's little vitriol and no one attempts to make their skinny white boy voices sound more intimidating than they already aren't. The backing tracks range from mind-shatter intensity to ass-shake funkiness to head-shake absurd. It's a sound a lot of artists are experimenting with right now, but few are nailing it the way Buck 65 is. He writes all the rhymes, delivers all the lyrics, produces every track and even scratches over top of it all. This singularity of vision and sound has resulted in one of the coolest albums to come down the pike in years.


But cool is not an end, it's a means to an end. Man Overboard is a revolutionary album, using coolness as an instrument of subversion. It's funky, fun, and smart, but a lot of hip-hop is. Buck deconstructs the standards of the genre and then rebuilds it crookedly. Bass lines, the blood of most good rap, are almost completely absent, replaced with throbbing, low-frequency drones. The beats and most of the samples, colored on many albums with static for that authentic, straight off the turntable sound, possess a metallic, digital edge, as if they've been downloaded rather than looped. And Buck gets absurd. Sure, a lot of the great hip-hop from 2001 (Roots Manuva, Cannibal Ox) alternate their seriousness with light-hearted raps about weed and girls, but no one gets as strange as Buck 65. It's refreshing, and the tunes are often as interesting as they are funny.


And I'd gladly cite examples of all these great tactics, but there are no song titles on Man Overboard. It's to be digested as a whole; each song lasting only as long as it needs to (usually two minutes) before fading into the next. I can tell you, however, that the first side of the album contains a track that samples the acoustic guitar intro to Metallica's "Battery", that the second side of the album is where I got the Art Bell discussion from (it separates a song that sounds like a pagan rave - flutes, violins, medieval madrigal vocals and funky drums - and a looping, brushed-drum, stand-up bass track that sounds more like "Singin' in the Rain" than "Ms. Fat Booty"); that the third side of the album opens with Buck predicting his life as an old man, blind, deaf and poor because "to make dollars I'd have to be something I despise" and because, "no one gets paid to make change"; and that the fourth side has a pair of gorgeous companion pieces; one song chronicling Buck's finding of true love in Heaven, one depicting his finding of true love on Earth, only to be stabbed in the back. There's also free-form tape-splice interludes, atmospheric, gliding noise, phone messages, expert scratching, jungle beats, songs about hip-hop culture and some of the most introspective, metaphor-laden rhymes you will ever hear.


Go hear it.