In 2003 I met KRS-One at a book signing & told him he changed my life. So obviously I was right there on release day to pick up Keep Right, & I used to crank it during those 90-minute round-trip commutes when I worked at Dulles Airport. Even with those rose-colored glasses, I had forgotten just how strong this album is. It isn't quite up to the standard of its predecessor Kristyles, but the songs are consistently good & it doesn't sag under its 51-minute weight.
Like I mentioned in my writeup on Kool G Rap's The Giancana Story, the early 2000s were not great years for indie hiphop production because music publishers were cracking down on sample clearance & a lot of beatmakers were afraid to use samples. Similar to that G Rap album, a lot of the beats on this album feel a bit too low-budget MIDI, & there are no real big-name producers. Kris kept this one in-house. (DJs are another story, though, as the album has scratch appearances by Q Bert & a young Statik Selektah!) Not all the beats are lackluster, though--"Me Man" by Domingo has a swaggering funky drum loop with a keening, ominous classical violin; "I Been There" by B. Creative rides a sinister piano loop with tasteful, reverb-drenched floating synths & staccato bass that stays just this side of being overproduced; Kris's frequent collaborator Soul Supreme from Inebriated Beats hits a home run with "Let Em Have It," an energetic uptempo track with horn stabs & Latin percussion. The Blastmaster himself contributes one beat to the pile, "The I," featuring a glittery orchestral sample & a typically rugged Mad Lion appearance. At least you can never accuse Kris of falling into the trap a lot of other veterans find themselves in, embarrassing themselves by trying to trend-hop & update their sound. The Teacha has no desire to court the mainstream. He always keeps it boom-bap, or at least boom-bap adjacent.
If the beats on Keep Right are not always stellar, the lyrics make up for them. KRS always has opinions, but depending on the album, he's gone back & forth between focusing his commentary on sociopolitical matters & targeting wack rappers & the state of the industry. On this album he leans more toward the latter, with songs like "Phucked" (largely about rappers who didn't take his advice to stay independent). But Kris is from the true school, so you never get a bunch of preaching without a whole lot of rappity rap, & for that I, at least, am grateful. The best balance is my favorite track on the album, "You Gon Go?" produced by Ten. On a slightly Preemo-esque, nostalgic sunny sounding beat, Kris bigs up his own live show while showing us how to separate the pros from the weekend warriors. "I'm still standing, & rappers be mad mad/Cuz they know they'll get burnt like the American flag in Baghdad/All they do is blab blab, that head chatter/Why the dopest emcee always a dead rapper?" Sadly, this song's assessments of the sorry state of hiphop in 2004 ring eerily true today. But I've been around long enough to know that's not so much because he was so prophetic but more because of how little anything really changes.
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