Now that Wyclef Jean’s got the dread Grammy disease, appearing everywhere but the front of a Wheaties box, locally born and Brooklyn-bred rapper Myself may be hip-hop’s best hope for the Afrocentric, musically and politically forward-thinking listener who likes the flavor of the islands. Unlike Clef’s genre-defining 1997 release The Carnival, the sprawl on this album never coheres into a whole. It sounds like a great mix tape, and that’s about it.

The scattershot nature of the tracks—some live, some studio, some collaborations, some not—attempts to show the many facets of Myself’s nature, and it works to an extent. The live cuts (like the opener, “Ma’at,”

and the Lyricist Lounge session “U Not”) show his deep connections to hip-hop as a spiritual and educational force, while the guest shots emphasize different aspects of Myself, from loverman (R. Kelly’s turn on “Who’s Gonna Love Me?”), to jazzbo (Fisiwe’s vocal stylings on “Luv Life”) to activist (“Time,” featuring black spoken-word avatars the Last Poets). The success of these experiments is sporadic, and combined with the wild variations in style and sound quality, the overall statement is fragmented and diffused—bad news for someone who so obviously wants to be a uniter.

Still, the pieces remain largely fascinating; when it all comes together, Myself is downright hypnotic. “U Not” is an astounding freestyle over shimmering vibes that takes hip-hop to task for cheddar-chasing, “Ghetto.Glyfix” utilizes a painfully sweet violin and guitar sample to paint a gorgeously cosmic spraypaint prophecy, and “Ithiopia” blends reggae and Afro-beat into a minor-key masterpiece. It would only take the slightest bit of reconfiguration to make Myself the multigenre master he clearly wants to be. As it stands now, Myself is just a little too schizophrenic to fully embrace his name. The possibilities, however, are endless. And goddamn exciting.