Forget the whole Marshall/Slim Shady/Eminem trichotomy, the real identity crisis going on in hip-hop is in the churning thoughts of Oliver Hart, alias Eyedea. He’s a self-hating braggart, an introspective extrovert, a seriously poetic battle rapper, a new-jack producer, at home alone with a pad as he is onstage on HBO. After slaying his competitors on Blaze Battle using nothing but good timing and clever punch lines, Eyedea turned to the much more formidable foes within on his First Born LP with DJ Abilities and now his follow up, The Many Faces Of Oliver Hart, or How Eye One The Write Too Think.

There’s no doubt Eyedea can slay his competitors onstage in a battle, but inside his own space the rules change; his skills won’t let him settle anything, they just allow him to articulate his madness with greater depth. He has a way of making his point so clearly in rhyme that it could not be felt any other way. In “On A Clear Day”, a dizzyingly contradictory song written for clarity, he describes himself as “just a parody of something that apparently was never properly prepared to bleed.” Poignancy like this is what makes this moving, thought-provoking material, but Eyedea’s method compromises its potency. Eyedea can rap extremely fast without slurring or dropping syllables, and his rhyme schemes are mind-blowing, but it’s very hard to keep up with when he’s bringing up serious issues. In a way it almost forces you to listen, but the listener misses a lot of the feeling trying to take it all in. Regardless, the thoughtful, artistic half of the album is a breathtaking experience.

The rest of the album is mostly straightforward up-tempo rhymes, with the usual attacks on the omnipresent wack MC and verbal discourse/bloody warfare metaphors. In these songs, Eyedea doesn’t have any real target for the shrapnel he spits, and the vicious, almost desperately immediate need for genius in a freestyle battle is lost in the studio. This is shown best in “Coaches” (feat. Carnage), where the live-taped intro is much more interesting than the track itself. The exception to the dis-appointing songs is the nonconformist anthem “Weird Side,” where he introduces himself and his quirks (namely that he’s an ugly white MC from the Midwest who’s better than most artists out there), at one point breaking into an unbelievable double time flow without skipping a beat. Like any master of the craft, he almost makes it sound easy to pull of saying “my mission is to get into your mind /and make you listen and rewind / what you were missing every time / that you insisted to be blind / I paint a picture with a rhyme. . .” before you have time to flip the CD case over to see what the name of the song is.

Even the weak tracks on Many Faces Of Oliver Hart serve to create a full self-portrait of a man, just as the conflicting styles on the album are what makes it complete. There is such a range of expression: personal anecdotes, heartbreaking narratives, protests against society, braggadocio, and even a torch song (“Here for You”). If you want music that is not just thoughtful but thought-provoking, then pick this one up.