Even though Kris's 1st album released under his own name arrived only a year after the final BDP album, Sex and Violence, it feels like a new era, largely because of production. Where the previous record was murky & gritty, Return of the Boom Bap is bright & shiny, dare I say radio-ready. (This should not be interpreted as a diss to Sex and Violence; if you read the linked writeup, you know I think it sounds better than this one overall.)
A big part of this change in sound is thanks to Kris having linked up with DJ Premier, who produces 6 of the album's 14 tracks. Preemo's inimitable sound (which I discussed at length in my writeup of Gang Starr's The Ownerz) is all over this record, from the sample-collage opener "KRS-One Attacks" to the walking bass & skittering jazz piano of "Mortal Thought." Still, while he produces a plurality of the tracks, it wouldn't be fair to say that Premier's sound dominates this record, because KRS himself provides some of the best instrumentals of his career as a producers, like the unorthodox fully-acapella vocal layers of "Uh Oh" (a cautionary street tale & spiritual successor to Edutainment's "Love's Gonna Get'cha"), or the playground chants of "Black Cop." That latter song is underappreciated, because it tends to get overshadowed by album centerpiece "Sound of da Police," a viciously funky Showbiz production that has rightfully gone down in history as hiphop's most iconic anti-cop anthem. "Black Cop," though, is just as good, & narrows its focus to specifically target African-American police officers as race traitors.
KRS-One albums, of which I have written about many in this series, with still 1 more to go, can vary in quality depending on a few different factors. 2 important ones are sequencing & lyrical topics. Kris balances his subject matter exceptionally well here, with pure ego-trip lyrical workouts (the title track, "Mortal Thought," "Mad Crew"), sociopolitical screeds (the aforementioned anti-cop duo, "Higher Level") & musings about the state of hiphop ("Outta Here," "I Can't Wake Up," "Stop Frontin'") getting more or less equal time. Kris uses his reggae-style delivery to great effect here; the emcee (who comes by it honestly thanks to his father being from Trinidad) switches effortlessly between AAVE & Caribbean patois on almost every song, sometimes multiple times. I've always enjoyed that side of Kris & I wonder what it would sound like if he decided to make a full-on dancehall album, Heavy D-style.
Of all the metaphysical deep dives that Kris has done, Preemo's horn-laden album closer "Higher Level" is perhaps the most incisive. A razor-sharp & clear-eyed critique of American Christofascism, it is bursting with quotables, like "People have more respect for a holy book/Than they do for a cow on a meathook," & the pithy, devastating "I don't want a god who blesses America."
I was grateful to revisit this one, because in my head it goes down as an album with a few absolute classics but slightly less consistent than its self-titled followup. After this relisten, I'm happy to say that I really can't choose between the 2. The only thing I'm certain of is that Kris was on an absolute hot streak during the '90s. Next time (& the last time) I'll be writing about KRS will be to discuss I Got Next, an album I never really connected with, & I'm excited to see if a reevaluation with 2022 ears will keep the run going.
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