The opening lyric: “We shoot from the hip and you scatter like roaches when the lightbulb‘s lit.” Vast Aire‘s good at clever, proverb-like punchlines and almost-Buddhist simple one-liners. Nor does he short shrift the dis on The Best Damn Rap Show (his second solo album since Cannibal Ox), where DJ Mighty Mi of High & Mighty does the beats in a classic breaks style. Absent from Aire‘s last album was his great storytelling ability-it returns here. “The Workover,” for instance, takes verbal revenge for about the last 100 years of American racism, and the racist/ capitalist hijacking of black music styles from jazz to rap: “We‘ve been struggling for too long/ you can change the year but I‘ll still sing the same song.”