Road 2 Nowhere – Pettidee

Pettidee
Race 2 Nowhere
Soldier Sound Records 2010
www.soldiersound.com

Race 2 Nowhere is the sixth album from Pettidee (aka Dewayne Petty), a Christian hip hop artist from Florida who is now based in Nashville. His dirty south sound is gritty, tough-as-nails, unflinchingly honest and musically intense.

At the same time, the album is compellingly tuneful, thanks to a generous injection of what Pettidee calls “Quad-Rock,” a mixture of hip hop, rock, jazz and digital. A lovely vocal line by Debra Hood on “Hydro,” which echoes in your mind long after the track is over, doesn’t hurt, either.

Race 2 Nowhere is a theme album, the songs vignettes about the mean streets and its satanic rule, but also how salvation is the antidote to, and escape valve from, a dead-end life of poverty, pain and entrapment. Just as Jesus was “beat for me and died,” he also “rose from the grave.”

The race metaphor flows throughout the project, which explodes like dynamite during the second track and current single, “The Ghetto.” Here, Pettidee exposes today’s crooked, mean-spirited, dog-eat-dog society, and his assertion that when you are “from the gutta of the ghetto…there’s nowhere else…to go” but up. And that’s exactly where he has gone.

Even though Pettidee rhymes about the “race to nowhere” existence from the other side of the hurdle, he doesn’t stop to rest. In “The Grind,” he raps, “I can’t give up or quit/Broke is bad for my health; My kids can’t eat a bowl of sorry for self.”

Race 2 Nowhere aims its invective between the eyes of the distinctly unsaved, whose road to potential salvation and survival isn’t paved with hymns but with hip hop. Pettidee spits his rhymes as if someone’s life depends on it, because someone’s does.

Four of Five Stars

gPod Picks: “The Ghetto,” “Fly,” “Freeze.”