On "Hunnid Stax", he's "splitting clits with a money clip"-a very vivid mental image-and on "Ride Slow" he raps slyly about the "residue on my debit card." The margins of the songs overflow with lots of in-studio goofing-especially on the album's hidden final track "W.R.O.H.", when Ab freestyles endlessly for an impressed group of friends. He repurposes the chorus of Chief Keef's "Love Sosa" on "Feelin' Us" and mockingly signs a broken-down version of "Hail Mary" on the Danny Brown-featuring "Ride Slow" as if he's purposefully misremembering it. On the infectiously simple DNYC3-produced ratchet (" Good Day," " Faded") cut "Twact," he makes an "Arabian Knight/ Camel toe" joke that belongs at a middle-school lunch table. That doesn't make him heavy, though-Ab's on-record presence is primarily a playful one. "I wonder if you still praying to the east, I wonder if you ever forgave me." On Control System, he narrated his battle with Stevens-Johnson syndrome and mourned the death of his partner and collaborator Alori Joi, and on the intensely emotional "Closure," he sings to an old flame. The more human Ab-Soul dares to be on record, the stronger he becomes. On the opening track "God's Reign", produced by Purity Ring's Corin Roddick (who's building an impressive sideline in hip-hop), he raps "Got your lady with literature in her Louis bag, got your kids studying outside of class", while on "Dub Sac" he wants us to remember that "martial law could happen any second!" He embraces his outsider status, filling his raps with struggling mid-level rapper details: On "Tree of Life", he recalls selling out S.O.B.'s, a time-honored rite of passage, and gives us his version of being hounded by paparazzi: Fans holding him up for pictures in the bus station terminal. He's a proud pipsqueak, in other words, the self-appointed nerd of a cerebral crew. He has a thing for commercial pariahs: He is probably one of five living rappers in America who still eagerly namechecks Canibus as an influence he called Slaughterhouse " the illest lyricists in the game." He's certainly the only Black Hippy member giving 16-plus bars to Asaad ("Stigmata"), a Philly firebrand best known for releasing a mixtape with 2Pac sodomizing Biggie on the cover. "Last-picked kid at gym class" suits Ab best anyway, since he reps the underdogs at every opportunity. It's a 2012-era Black Hippy release through and through, with the sprawling runtime (90-plus minutes), resonant repeated catchphrases, and grey-toned mood to prove it. But These Days., which finally sees release this week, doesn't seem to mind. In the meantime, Isaiah Rashad may have eaten his lunch. It's a poignant revelation, one casting Ab as the last-picked kid in gym class. It was a major-label effort, through and through, the strain of compromise pulling at even its strongest cuts.Īb-Soul, it was recently revealed, was never signed to Interscope. Oxymoron performed respectably on the album charts, but it also broke decisively with the moody, cinematic feel of the first flush of TDE releases. When I saw him perform an obligatory, dead-eyed in-store at a Beats store in February, he dryly pointed to the terrible sound system as an indicator of his status: "A nigga gotta go platinum," he joked. His first two albums, 2011’s Follow Me Home and 2015’s 90059, each rank among the grittiest, most acclaimed street rap albums of the century so far.Since then, Kendrick has crossed over-into platinum sales, apology texts from Macklemore, subliminal feuds with Drake-while Schoolboy, several tiers beneath his leader, toils in rap's middle class. More than a decade before then, he signed a major label deal and scored a hit with the Lil Wayne and will.i.am-assisted “All My Life (In the Ghetto).” He then landed on XXL’s coveted Freshman cover and helped spearhead TDE’s takeover of the hip-hop world. Prior to 2018, Rock’s status was already unquestionable in the West. “King’s Dead” was also featured on Black Panther: The Album, the widely acclaimed soundtrack to the 2018 box office hit Black Panther. Songs from that album earned him three of his four Grammy nominations: Best Rap Song for both “WIN” and his Kendrick Lamar, Future, and James Blake collaboration “King’s Dead,” which took home the trophy in the Best Rap Performance category and has garnered over 2.5 billion global streams and counting. The new offerings come five years after Redemption, the 2018 album that confirmed Jay Rock’s status as one of the sharpest observers and most uncompromising storytellers to emerge from California in his generation.
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