Father MC Presents: Learn Along With Werner, part 4

While searching for another record (which you can expect a post on in the very near future), I stumbled across an odd listing on gemm... besides your usual plethora of listings for Father MC and Father, there was one or two for "Father M.c. Presents Bishop." Whoza whatza? Well, once I learned that there was a record billed as "Father M.c. Presents Bishop," I poked around and discovered there's a whole album by "Father M.c. Presents Bishop," hereafter just Bishop; and so of course I had to have it!

The album is called The Missing Link, and it came out in 1998 on Bi-Law Entertainment/ (unsurprisingly) Echo International. Echo was apparently the home for a lot of Father's projects around that time. And for you Father MC completists, you'll be happy to know that it can be had for basically just the price of shipping from Amazon and anyplace else.

Inside, the album gives us a helpful little bio of Bishaop a.k.a. Carlos Lewis "the 25 year old R&B sensation." He's from Florida, which makes sense, since this is also about the time Father was down there working with Luke Records and Teez. Most of the bio's pretty generic ("he had dreams of becoming a superstar, but knew he had a long way to go, blah blah blah") but it ends with a short paragraph on the Father MC connection: "Bishop knew if he wanted to get discovered he had to get his sound out, so he started sending out demos and doing talent shows in different cities. His demo tape ended up in the hands of Father MC, thus the beginning of his professional career."

So this is a full-length album, but there is also a 12" single that's on Echo as well - in fact, that's the listing I first stumbled upon. It's three songs, "Call Me," "Lovely" and "So Hot," all of which are featured on this album. There are no instrumentals, alternate mixes or anything like that; but some copies do at least come in a picture cover.

Ultimately, however, this all boils down to one great, big fat disappointment: Father MC is nowhere on this album! There are no guest verses or writing credits like the other albums he did with R&B groups - Gamin' by Teez (for the story there, see: Learn Along With Werner, part 1) and I Love You Like You Are by Ray Parker Jr. (see: Learn Along With Werner, part 2). Those albums were chock full of Father MC's contributions; but here, Father is only the executive producer. Bishop's not a bad singer, but this entire CD is pretty generic and un-engrossing by R&B standards, much less by the standards of a Father MC fan looking for raps.

So I will be putting this album away, probably to never listen to again. But, hey, it cost practically nothing and we all got to learn about another interesting side-note in Father MC's career (one might even dub it... The Missing Link! ha ha ha). So it was worth it for me.