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" Down syndrome: the fantasy that being into hip-hop makes a goofy white kid any less goofy. Or white. It&amp;#039;s why BlakRoc, the new collective, begs some suspension of disbelief, what with blues-rock duo the Black Keys backing MCs like Mos Def, Ludacris, Q-Tip, and assorted surviving members of the Wu-Tang Clan. But the band&amp;#039;s Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, as pasty as any young men ever to come from northern Ohio, are experts at tapping into an even deeper delusion: Badass music makes you a badass, too.  So is it a hip-hop or a rock record? It depends on what you&amp;#039;re hearing or \u2014 listening for \u2014 in each song. The highest praise is that it&amp;#039;s just music, made the way great records always have been: by a group of musicians really going after something. In this case, it&amp;#039;s Auerbach&amp;#039;s declaration, &amp;quot;No samples are used on the album. It&amp;#039;s all live instruments and live vocals.&amp;quot; Unlike every hip-hop and rock blind-date hookup augured by Aerosmith&amp;#039;s miming &amp;quot;Walk This Way&amp;quot; with Run-DMC, fusing hip-hop and rock isn&amp;#039;t the goal but a starting place. The rappers make it great, stepping up their game to flow with Auerbach and Carney&amp;#039;s bluesy swing. Mos Def&amp;#039;s tenor-sax-like phrasings pop and sizzle like ice cubes dropped in a deep fryer, newcomer NOE is a holy-shit vocal dead ringer for Jay-Z, and RZA, Raekwon, and ODB recall all of Wu-Tang&amp;#039;s gritty greatness. But for all this hip-hop talent, they really just do what they do, which is rhyme over beats. Auerbach and Carney&amp;#039;s muscular climb up the slippery slope, where a misstep could slide them into a trough of Limp Bizkit, is a swaggering assertion of musicians&amp;#039; will over form.  The Black Keys grew restive after issuing a guitar-and-drums blues challenge to the White Stripes from the other side of Lake Erie, five rec-ords ago, in 2002. Their impulse to tear shit up has gone from blunt-force primitivism to collaborating with Gnarls Barkley instigator Danger Mouse for 2008&amp;#039;s spacey Attack and Release. Each of their side projects released last year (drummer Carney&amp;#039;s with the band Drummer) bears only a faint connection to the music they&amp;#039;ve made together. For this next trick, they teamed with Damon Dash, whose Roc half of the common band, album, and record-label name is a nod to Roc-A-Fella, which he cofounded with Jay-Z, and who wrangled the hip-hop talent. Auerbach and Carney are both just cresting 30, part of a generation of musicians who grew up on their parents&amp;#039; album rock and their own cassettes of the only real rock stars the &amp;#039;90s could offer: rappers. Their playing on &amp;quot;Hard Times&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Ain&amp;#039;t Nothing Like You&amp;quot; is so studied, it&amp;#039;s effortless. It&amp;#039;s the kind of thing that began not as a project to unearth a common ancestor from the Delta silt but as a couple of guys screwing around in rehearsal, trying to make their favorite hip-hop sounds on rock instruments in the same way early DJs tried to emulate disco remixes with their turntables. Maybe this is why the rhymes have the immediacy of street-corner battle rhymes.  The rappers, removed from hip-hop&amp;#039;s Stage IV commerciality, are free to just rock a beat. The two guys making it are just trying to rock whatever they can. 50 Songs Every Man Should Listen To (Including Ones by Mos Def &amp;amp;amp; The Black Keys) &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/reviews/a6773/blak-roc-review-0110/>