Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (5470 of them)
Yeah, I wouldn't say Big K.R.I.T. has a signature song. I was going to bring Pill up in contrast as someone who does have a signature song (and an affiliation, via Killer Mike or whatever he's bowlderized his name to), but since you already did, I think that was a conscious, and smart, career move on Pill's part that K.R.I.T. hasn't taken, because it does give listeners an in before they spring for a whole tape.
I think calling Krit just some rapper influenced by T.I. shortsells him. He definitely is post-Tip, but no moreso than any other lyrical Southern street rapper of the past five years. I think Deej was more talking about T.I. as a archetype for rappers in his wake than doing that, though. I also hear a lot of Pimp C and, in his more reflective moments, Cee-Lo in Big K.R.I.T., but that's also reductive. He's definitely his own rapper, and very versatile at that, comfortable rapping fast, slow, aggressively, laid-back, nimbly switching syncopations, and combining any of those elements. As a lyricist he's also versatile. He doesn't stray at all from standard rap subject matter, but he's plenty comfortable going anywhere within that realm, so he's not really rapping about the same things song after song. He's pretty topical for the most part, but at the same time has no problem dropping something offbeat like "I keep a bad yellowbone in a playaz circle/ Whoopi Goldberg cause she color purple/ Did I do that? Just call me Urkel/ Crawlin' green in a hardtop like turtle" in the middle of a sex rap. He also comes up with pretty catchy hooks. Deej called him "virtuosic", and while that might be a bit premature, I don't think it's too far off at all.
Going back to what you guys were saying about DJ Burn One, I feel that, but DJ Breakem Off does even better to make a coherent tape. Instead of taking Burn One's more hands off approach, his mixing actually improves the tape, rare thing. The first five tracks are played as a mixed suite, with hooks and beats overlapping onto one another, and Krit goes hard on each of those. He doesn't really give you a chance for your jaw to snap back into place until about 10 minutes into the tape. Past the opening suite, it's just really well sequenced. I listened to his previous mixtape with a different DJ, and sure good raps and good beats, but it didn't feel like more than the sum of its parts than this one.
His beats definitely place him in this Gulf Coast lineage, but are distinct because he isn't afraid to let the seams show. They're kind of ramshackle and unpolished, kinda like if BlockBeataz had just a tiny hint of early RZA (Krit seems to share RZA's love of ominous string loops).
This is my favorite track of his, and pretty representative. It has the aforementioned lines and features his dude Big Sant rapping leadoff, who is also awesome, but I can't quite place who he sounds like even though it seems like it should be obvious.
http://limelinx.com/files/3ff93c278eea00182d6c49e55834a214
I'm excited about Krit because I see him as having a lot of room to develop but is already coming from a pretty high spot to begin with. I'm not saying by any means that he's going to blow up (for one thing, he has to get better at marketing himself first, especially being that he's from the middle of nowhere), but I can see him as releasing good music for quite a while.
And yeah, his name is kinda funny.
― condaleeza spice (The Reverend), Sunday, January 3, 2010 7:38 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
this is a very good post, & very otm
i thought i wrote a fair amount of how what was so good about the big k.r.i.t. tape was pretty much how much promise i thought it showed ... hes definitely not fully developed as an artist yet, but he seems to hit a lot of different touchpoints I like, & his style feels a lot more flexible & diverse &, i dont know, interesting than gibbs & pill who usually strike me as pretty dry. I dont think any of these dudes have dropped masterpieces, but the conceit of my post was this: if we were to play a predictions game on rap artists likely to have great careers, K.R.I.T.'s tape sounded the most promising & i found it to be the most listenable, i was much more caught up in it than I was in the pill or gibbs stuff, he's just less dry & connects on an emotional level in a dungeon fam style ... hes messy in some ways on a lyrical level, with a filler line or something that doesnt quite ring like its supposed to -- less precise & technical than a guy like pill -- but also more genuine, & its inconsistent in the way "I'm Serious" was ... the T.I. comparison is on a broader level than just a lyrical influence, it was, like, he's a well-rounded rap artist w/ a number of different approaches.
the other thing is, yeah, this tape is hella listenable, simply because of how its sequences & mixed.
― deej, Monday, 4 January 2010 05:02 (fourteen years ago) link