Hip-hop's stoner king branching out from mellow

Despite being known to music industry insiders as "the Great White Dope" since his start, Asher Roth is no dummy. The 26-year-old Philly-by-way-of-Morrisville rapper has kept his rep as the stoner king of party-hearty Caucasian hip-hop since dropping his first album in 2009, Asleep in the Bread Aisle.

Just as he did during his days at West Chester University, Roth leaned heavily on social-networking websites, and kept up a fairly steady stream of mixtapes and EPs, such as The Rawth EP and his recent Pabst & Jazz session.

Creating an initiative called Bongress.com to encourage voting and awareness regarding the Prop 19 cannabis act (T-shirts featured "The Repufflican" and "The Demochronic") only bolstered his credibility with his stoner cohort.

Yet with his next major-label CD coming this winter - Is This Too Orange? on Def Jam - Roth made an interesting statement during a most intimate gig at MilkBoy Philly, on Chestnut Street, late Thursday night.

Wearing an orange hockey jersey with Bobby Clarke's number 16 emblazoned across it ("Flyers got the win," he yelled) the wavy-haired Roth reassured the house, packed with guys in pointy woolly hats, that he was still the man behind the blunt-'n'-brew-filled song "I Love College."

"I still drink beer and smoke pot," he said, laughing. "Just not as much of it."

With that Roth and his live crew launched into newer songs with not-so-stoned lyrics that his fans also knew the words to, such as "Not Meant 2 Be" from Pabst & Jazz. Roth and company showed off new songs that were bubblier and jazzier than his mellow usual.

"Million-dollar homes, million-dollar yachts / Corner office and my secretary's hot / Wait a second, I think definitely not / My integrity is the only thing I got."

That's not the stuff that Shakespearean dreams are made of, but it's not a bad start at subject matter other than weed and girls.

Roth slurped and spat the kind-of conscious rap to the syrupy new song "Common Knowledge" through an effect pedal that made his voice sound ever-so-distorted. "Climb the ladder of success / Skipping and missing a step," went the rhyme.

Clearly, this time around, Roth has business on his mind. But he's still trying to satisfy his creed-of-weed followers with his old hits. Oddly though, those hits don't quite generate the same heady buzz that they used to.