Dream Warriors: Confucian is the Style I Send

My SinkThe interconnectedness of the UK and its good son Canada can't be contested. I mean the Queen's on Canuck money still. And perhaps because of this it's less difficult for acts from either one of those nations to traffic back and forth between the charts successfully. England's wayward, bastard child, the US doesn't afford artists from either nation that sort of consideration. It's an odd tag team that doesn't always make sense - why is Pete Doherty so famous on that tiny island and virtually unknown in the States? That won't be surmised herein, but the lack of success after the Dream Warriors' first disc - And Now The Legacy Begins - won't be figured either.

Beginning at roughly the same time as De La Soul and Digable Planets, the northern cousin to these acts, Dream Warriors worked with basically the same palette of sounds and samples. The overt appreciation of jazz is present, as are the rhymes touting folks with afros and political savvy. But for some unknown and unexplainable reason, the group just never really impacted the States. And while mentioning those US based groups doesn't mean that the Dream Warriors worked with the same quality, they did.

The groups' first disc sported a few singles that weren't necessarily as clever as anything from De La Soul, but the melodic aspect to the Dream Warriors work might surpass those DAISY Age progenitors. The reggae style cutup that announces the beginning of "Wash Your Face In My Sink" isn't repeated anywhere else on this disc, apart from "Ludi." But in this better known track, the duo of King Lou and Capital Q compete to critique their lesser pals and each poor habit that they exhibit. It's apparently detrimental to the life of everyone on earth if you leave a ring around the basin of a friends sink - who knew. The ideas expressed here might not be the most revelatory, but the sample for that track - snagged from Quincy Jones - predates its use in that Mike Myers flick from a few years later. It might just be a Canadian thing.

The strength of that single wasn't able to really impact the US charts, but in the UK charts that song as well as "My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style" broke the top twenty. That latter track, which sounds a bit more dated than the more recognizable song, sounds a bit dated at this point. It's probably too much to figure that American audiences already knew that And Now The Legacy Begins wouldn't age as well as anything from the De La Soul catalog, but who knows.

Subsequent to his first album - even as "Do Not Feed the Alligators" sports lines like "I got my mind on the rhyme like an optical disc drive" and sounds futuristic in a general sense - Dream Warriors wasn't able to follow up this first effort with another album that would reach a wider audience. Unfortunately, a few more discs would see release through EMI, but with scant support, the well eventually dried up.