I’ve started to think of Black Ken as a metaphysical He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper situation. Over its 27 tracks, Lil B raps over entirely self-produced beats with occasional narration from the omniscient DJ BasedGod. And its first eight tracks represent his most purposeful block of music since his 2009 opus 6 Kiss—raw, squelching loops of murderous funk and 808s that land like uppercuts, stuff that sounds like you could’ve bought it on cassette out of a trunk in ’88. The first we hear of B’s voice on “Still Run It”—measured, resolute, completely unlike his liquid freestyles—he is channeling a Tupac flow, a reminder of the icon’s claim to Oakland as the city that put him on game in his Digital Underground days. “Hip-hop is back!” B crows, and if you didn’t believe him the first time, three tracks later is “Hip Hop,” unquestionably the dopest song this side of the Reagan (or Dregan) administration with a “Hip! Hop! Hip! Hop!” chorus. “Remember I was younger, I always loved music/So now it’s an honor to write and produce it,” he raps; it all could’ve easily read as kitsch if the beat didn’t knock so hard, or if he didn’t so plainly believe it.Black Ken channels the sound of Lil B’s hometown in the years just before his birth—an era in which Bay Area rap stood uncompromisingly apart from the industry out of both necessity and pride. The result is an outsider artist’s take on old Too $hort or Kool Rock Jay tapes: plain-spoken neighborhood tours that impart real-life lessons in self-reliance over booming, brittle 808s and P-Funk tracks stripped for parts. “Bad MF,” on which B tells a snitch to kick rocks (“Catch the bus, motherfucker!”), has the kind of roughneck piano beat that evokes a virtuoso who plays only with his elbows, with funk licks that make me want to stomp down an alley kicking over trash cans. And when on “Free Life” he wonders how to exist happily in an exhausting world, his reminder that “the best things in life are free” is not a cliché, but a distillation of based philosophy in the style of Too $hort’s “It’s Your Life,” a 1990 lesson in imposing the positive. The album’s mid-way hyphy section is a less successful revival, but it’s worth it for B snarling, “Gentrify me? I beg your pardon!” in his best Keak Da Sneak voice on “Getting Hot.”
― j., Friday, 25 August 2017 03:41 (six years ago) link