It's no exaggeration to say that the Black Star album changed my life, so my relationship with Talib Kweli runs deep. He spent a long time in my top 5 & he is probably the performer I've seen the most times in concert. Witnessing his slow-motion social media meltdown over the last 10 years has been frustrating. I won't share my personal interpretation because I don't have the facts, but Res's sexual harassment accusations seem very plausible, & it's clear from his subsequent bullying of every black woman who came to her defense that Kweli has some deep issues around masculinity. (Look back at his lyrics, including the ones on this album, & you can tell.) In a more general sense, my uncle Mu made an acute observation that a lot of artists who were progressive in the '80s/'90s have been unable to keep up with the times. So many old hiphoppers whom we respected for saying things that were needed back in the day are showing their asses now because they failed to evolve politically.
But Mu also reminded me that Kweli rapped with a huge chip on his shoulder from the moment he entered the game. He's always been insecure, with an ego as fragile as it is inflated. For all the pretentious bloviating of his rhyme style, he also has "a complex about getting too complex" & constantly tries to be hood. Nobody has ever really bought Kweli as a street rapper, but that hasn't stopped him from trying. He wants to be all things to all people: a conscious, educated (but don't call him political), hardcore, club knocking, mainstream, underground, playalistic feminist. The closest he came to achieving this was his 2002 album Quality, with the huge single "Get By." The Beautiful Struggle is his highly anticipated followup, & it was perceived as the record that would make or break him as a factor in the mainstream.
Of course, something happened between 2002 & 2004: Kanye West's price went up & Rawkus could only afford 1 beat from him. That beat was "I Try," a shameless attempt to recreate "Get By," with an almost-identical piano loop & a Mary J. Blige feature in place of the Nina Simone sample. The lyrics are decent, but the whole song so clearly exists in the shadow of its predecessor that it's hard to be impressed by it.
In "I Try," Kweli notes, "I have trouble tryna write/Some shit that bang in the club through the night." Yeah, we know my dude, because we just heard "A Game," an awkward attempt at a club banger that fails on every level. Another production misfire is "Broken Glass," a noisy, annoying beat from the Neptunes leftover pack, on top of which Kweli tells the story of a "fallen woman" who used her body to get success until her body betrayed her...yeah, subtly misogynist, but not nearly as bad as "Back Up Offa Me," where he spits some distasteful bars about Kobe Bryant's rape case, implying that Kobe's abuser lied.
"Back Up Offa Me" is a waste of a good beat, one of 3 by Kweli's old partner Hi-Tek, with whom he's always had good chemistry. Another Hi-Tek production, "Work it Out," has some incredible bars but the beat is Tek's weakest, like, ever. The only place Tek's production & Kweli's lyrics really match up is on the closing title track, in which Kweli protests again at being called a political rapper while flexing his political education.
Like usual, when he's in his conscious bag is when Kweli shines: the opener "Going Hard" (I first heard that verse when he appeared with Yasiin on "Chappelle's Show" as part of the first, false-alarm Black Star reunion), "Around My Way" (the best song on the album, with John Legend singing an interpolation of the verse melody from "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" by The Police, a gamble which could have been incredibly corny but paid off), & "Ghetto Show" featuring Common & Anthony Hamilton. "Black Girl Pain" is a song I'm ambivalent about. Jean Grae's feature is by far the best part of that song, & I wonder about the microaggression of not listing her name in the credits. If you love black women so much, Kwe, why do you seemingly bully them every chance you get? Res & Maya Moody are just the tip of this iceberg. (Speaking of Res, the less said about "We Got the Beat," a woeful take on "Planet Rock" where she sings the hook, the better.)
I vibe with about half the songs on this album, & the sad thing about that is, this was the best it would get for a while. His followup, Eardrum, has some great production, but from here on out it would be diminishing returns, with the odd outlier (I liked the 2012 "Attack the Block" mixtape). Hard to say exactly when the Kweli spiral began, but you can see the seeds of it right here.
No comments:
Post a Comment