Your guess is as good as mine as to why Kris decided to start releasing records under his own name instead of Boogie Down Productions. The style & sound were the same, the personnel were the same, & the albums still bore the credit "Overseen by Scott La Rock." But there's no denying that on this album & its predecessor, KRS sounds reinvigorated (although I'm a big fan of Sex and Violence), both verbally & musically, & this album is a blast of confidence without a weak track to be found.
There is a great balance between conceptual, message-oriented tracks & classic braggadocio on this album. Of the ego-trip joints, the clear winner is "MC's Act Like They Don't Know," which is one of my candidates for best rap song ever made. The beat is classic DJ Premier, built atop a dramatic Clifford Brown sample with bouncing bass & jazzy chords, plus that bell! Meanwhile Kris is relentless with his booming voice, experimenting with choppy flows but somehow always staying in the pocket. Damn near every bar is a quotable. The same can be said for the opener "Rappaz R. N. Dainja," another Preemo production, & "Wannabemceez" with its fiery Mad Lion feature. While Preemo puts in some serious work on this album, the production hero is Kris himself, who laces 6 of the album's 14 songs, & from the pulsing bass & eerie piano chords of the staggering "Ah-Yeah" to the compulsively head-noddy "Free Mumia" to the dramatic, moody synths of "Health, Wealth, Self," they're the best bunch of beats he's ever assembled.
The ego-trip songs are good, but it's on the conscious joints that KRS sounds better than ever: righteous, inflamed & full of purpose. On "Ah-Yeah," a song dedicated to the Black Panther Party, he unleashes an impressive litany of Black revolutionary figures he claims to embody the spirit of, depending on the necessity of the moment. Sometimes the pacifism of a Sojourner Truth is called for, he says, & sometimes the violence of a Nat Turner--sometimes the extremism of a Bobby Seale, & sometimes the mediation of a Kwame Ture. In "R.E.A.L.I.T.Y.," perhaps the most complex song on the album, Kris makes reference to the double consciousness of W.E.B. Dubois while unfolding a treatise on the exigency of hiphop in the gulf between what has been promised to Black America & what has been delivered--what he calls truth, meaning what's on paper, vs. reality, meaning lived experience. "The truth is that police must serve & protect/Reality is Black youth are shown no respect/The truth is government has a war against drugs/Reality is government is ruled by thugs." On "Free Mumia," Kris & Channel Live take down the self-appointed moral guardians of American culture who have attacked hiphop music; everybody from C. Delores Tucker (who gets off easy compared to the demo version of the track that has Channel Live describing a sexual encounter with her) to Tipper Gore & Rush Limbaugh. Then there's "Out for Fame," another rock-solid KRS production & ode to graffiti culture where Kris compares the commercialization of rap music to the (at that time) still-underground graf scene. "Now that rap music's making money for the corporate/It's acceptable to flaunt it, now everybody's on it/Graffiti isn't corporate so it gets no respect/Hasn't made a billion dollars for some corporation yet." I have to imagine in a post-Banksy world that Kris looks back on these bars with the rueful satisfaction of a Cassandra.
There are a few bars in here that aged poorly, like Kris on "De Automatic" suggesting that his opponents are soft by saying they "wear a pair of panties," or dismissing wack emcees who "should be wearing an apron scraping a pot with a name like Miriam" on "Build Ya Skillz." (The latter song also features Busta Rhymes throwing around the "batty boy" slur, but we all knew that about Busta.) Considering Kris's repeated references to "the goddess" on this album & his insistence that his higher power is a Black woman, it's odd to hear him grab the low-hanging fruit of suggesting feminine = inferior. He's too good a lyricist to need that.
Despite a problematic or struggle bar here & there, this album is an embarrassment of riches for lovers of boom-bap & conscious lyrics. If I had to choose just 1, I'd say this is the best & most consistent album KRS ever made.
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