Various Artists: DJ Red Alert Presents Beats, Rhymes & Battles, Vol. 1

Although the deaths of Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur robbed the hip-hop response song of much of its innocence, there's still something quaint and almost wholesome about the genre. After all, in a culture wracked by violence, poverty, and crime, it's strangely reassuring to hear rappers attacking each other with nothing worse than ego-bruising taunts and linguistic jabs. Beats, Rhymes & Battles offers a nostalgic glance at the early days of the response record, when a sassy 14-year-old like Roxanne Shanté could make a name for herself by shredding a briefly popular group, and MC Shan and KRS-One fought an epic battle over hip-hop's origins. Structured as an informal history lesson from legendary DJ Red Alert, Beats only documents a handful of lyrical skirmishes, devoting almost a third of its 13 songs to KRS-One and MC Shan's Bronx vs. Queensbridge feud alone. While it's great to hear classic and semi-obscure response songs alongside the tracks that inspired them, the disc's execution leaves much to be desired. DJ Red Alert may be a hip-hop legend, but his seven rambling, disjointed, and uninformative interludes too accurately capture the windy desperation of a radio jock winding down the clock until his replacement arrives. Even worse, he doesn't seem big on specific details—when discussing LL Cool J's "To Da Break Of Dawn," he mentions Cool J's beef with Hammer and Ice-T without acknowledging its origins—or overall coherence. That's a shame, because when Red Alert isn't wasting time, Beats, Rhymes & Battles is terrific. It's a well-chosen, if regrettably brief, primer on hip-hop history, riddled with giddy, joyously retro highs like Salt 'N' Pepa's Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick-disparaging "The Show Stopper." For all its flaws, Beats remains an enjoyable tour through the rugged but weirdly innocent terrain of old-school beefs and battles. Let's just hope that future volumes contain more beats, rhymes, and battles, and less time-wasting shtick.