I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure this was the 1st KRS-One CD I bought, & it must have been right around the time it was released. It had been 4 years since I Got Next, the longest break he's ever taken between albums before or since. As he explains in the song "Hiphop Knowledge," Kris put his recording career on pause in the late '90s to become a record executive, working as vice-president of A&R for Reprise, a WarnerMedia label. After a few years the cognitive dissonance got too much for him, feeling like a sellout while being so publicly critical of the mainstream music industry, so he quit that job & returned to making records, beginning with The Sneak Attack. You don't need to know all this history to hear that Kris sounds reinvigorated on this album, demolishing every beat & taking out all frauds. Simply put, even more than usual, the Teacha is rapping his ass off on this record!
This album title does not use the word "attack" frivolously. This is possibly the most aggressive album KRS ever made. A lot of it has to do with his delivery: even on ostensibly softer moments like the female-sung hooks of the title track or "The Lessin," the Blastmasta is still blasting with exuberant authority. The production is almost uniformly loud, brickwalled & in your face. More than half the beats are produced by either Kris or his brother Kenny, & their production styles are pretty much indistinguishable: hard drums & stabbing synth chops. Rather than sounding samey, though, aggressive uptempo beats like "Attendance," "Why," "I Will Make It" & "Get Your Self Up" contribute to the album's overall breathless, propulsive energy. When a beatmaker not named Parker enters the arena, it provides a little bit of relief--they still knock just as hard, but there's a bit more melody & subtlety to be found in Domingo's "What Kinda World" with its off-kilter drumbeat & Latin-flavored horns; his mournful strings loops on "Hiphop Knowledge"; the descending harp lines of Fredwreck's "Shutupayouface"; or the tremolo-picked acoustic guitars & eerie choirs of Mad Lion's "The Raptizm."
KRS didn't always walk that fine line between righteous rage & excessive preachiness with success, especially in his later work, but he's nothing if not surefooted here. He hits on a variety of subject matter, but it's usually straight out of the KRS playbook: the sorry state of mainstream rap, his Black liberationist take on politics, & the spirituality of hiphop. I think the most interesting piece is the aforementioned "Hiphop Knowledge" (also the album's midpoint), where he uses a fast, insistent flow, just shy of speed rap. to recount the story of his entire career up to that point, broken down year by year, & how he came full-circle in his thinking. The way he describes the decision to quit his record label job by echoing the sentiment from Afrika Bambaataa that set him on the road to conscious rap in the first place is beautiful & resonant. By the time we get to the closer "The Raptizm," where Kris innovates a wholly unique flow, 2 things are clear: the old master was still bringing new styles into the millennium, & he was thinking deeply about spirituality (it came as no surprise when his next album was Spiritual Minded, though the explicitly Christian lens was kind of a curveball).
I think of this record as the start of "new school" KRS--it follows a natural break after his experience as an executive & after he stopped even trying to court the charts. It's weird (i.e. makes me feel old) to contemplate that The Sneak Attack is now 7 years older than Criminal Minded was when it came out. After a certain point, it becomes a little silly to categorize eras of an artist's career, because once enough time passes the stylistic subtleties will be irrelevant. Just like nobody but the most fastidious classical music nerds makes a big deal about the 16 years between Beethoven's 5th & 9th symphonies, in 200 years when KRS-One's oeuvre is studied (which I hope it is), it will be taken as whole. I have a feeling when removed from the context of "it's not classic KRS," the pounding, pugnacious, quotable-filled The Sneak Attack will take its rightful place among his best work.
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