Conversations With Kenny/Legacy of Lee

Kenny Dennis might be the most off-kilter alter ago that any rapper of note has turned into a main attraction, but one thing he needed early on was an adversary. Three years after Dennehy introduced Kenny and three years before Kenny Dennis EP began to make him a more prominent element of his discography, Serengeti fully realized the idea of Kenny in rap battle mode; this is where Kenny graduated from rap character to character-as-rapper. Geti plays not only KD but his pitched-down, droopy-flowing adversary Lee, a sanitation worker turned aspiring rapper/laundromat entrepreneur — his jingle for his envisioned “Bubbles and Fun” goofily interpolates “If I Ruled the World” — who gets besieged by the failures of his vision in ways both absurdly comic and recognizably tragic. This sets off Tony Trimm, the album’s (real-world) producer and Lee’s (in-universe) mentor; in the skirmish that pierces the album’s midpoint Trimm belittles Kenny for being stuck in a middle-aged blue-collar rut while Kenny retorts with embittered challenges to Tony’s masculinity. It’s a two-way tie for last, and even if they wind up burying the hatchet once Trimm finds love after a trip to Berlin (“Trimm’s Alright,” featuring the most deranged VU “Femme Fatale” reference in recorded history), Kenny doesn’t fully resolve his own troubles until he suffers a downward spiral (“Rock Bottom”) that precipitates an album-closing trip to a recovery program (“Back on Your Feet”). Meanwhile Lee temporarily finds something resembling happiness with a ferret-owning boho/goth/hippie girlfriend with the deeply unlikely name “Pottery,” but it can’t last either because he realizes it’s a bad fit (“all my cousins are like ‘Burning Man? What the hell is that?’”). There’s something very Great Recession about this album — people hustling to find work, struggling to find a way out, and lashing out at whatever’s closest, including themselves. But there’s a sense of empathy beneath it all; these characters may be schlimazels, but they’re not buffoons.