One peculiarity with the Good Life Café, is that it was headed by a woman, B. Hall, and open to feminine talents. The Project Blowed compilation shows this clearly. One of its highlights, the "Heavyweights Round 2" freestyle, has as many femcees as males on it. There, Medusa and her cousin Koko - a.k.a. S.I.N. - Nefertiti and T-Love challenge males such as Mikah 9, Self Jupiter, Volume 10, and a few others.
The best song with women, though, is "Don't Get It Twisted". Delivered by Jyant (Ronda Ross) and Eve (Ava DuVernay), collectively known as the Figures Of Speech, it is a perfect sample of the Good Life style, with its erratic and unpredictable music, full of versatile flows and rhythm.
This track will be, for a long time, the only available music from the duo. No album will ever be released by them, indeed, until The Last Word in 2007. By then, however, both women have more or less put an end to their rap careers. This record, actually, is a compilation of songs recorded here and there, between 92 and 96, and collected by Omid Walizadeh, the producer, a heir of the Project Blowed scene.
The hazardous origin of most tracks is quite perceptible, their sound quality being often low, and some tracks like a "On The Road" - actually the hook of a song from The Nonce, sung by the two ladies - look somehow like a filler.
Most tracks, though, have something in common: on them, the Figures Of Speech look like a feminine Freestyle Fellowship. Their music is delicate, jazzy, and at times experimental, like with the strange "Last Minutes". They are equally distant from New-York's boom bap and California's own g-funk. Both women - one of them, Eve, studied at the UCLA when attending the Good Life sessions - look quite literate. Their raps are fast, especially on "Doe See Doe" and "Avoidance", when competing against NGA FSH's supersonic delivery. Their flows are constantly moving and changing. They even sing. And they go beyond rap music, like when turning reggae with Abstract Rude on "Babylon".
This compilation is a precious testimony of a time long gone, along with another document, put together by some of the same people. Around the same time, indeed, supported by Omid, Eve shots a documentary about the Good Life Café called This Is The Life. Ava DuVernay, actually, has just started a career in cinema under her true name. She will eventually become famous with Selma, a movie about Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, made with the help of heavyweights like Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt. While Jyant will vanish, Eve's career as a director will help her reaching levels of notoriety she could never have expected as an underground rapper. Thanks to The Last Word, though, her hip-hop background will be recalled.
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