KRS-One was on fire in the mid-'90s, following up the twin triumphs of Return of the Boom Bap & his self-titled album with his most successful record ever: the gold-selling, top 10-charting I Got Next, which was buoyed by the single "Step Into a World (Rapture's Delight)." But this album is not of a piece with its 2 predecessors, largely because it's missing DJ Premier, who brought them a fresh, irrepressible sound. Instead, KRS himself handles the bulk of the production (over half the proper songs), & it's his reliable brand of bassy, hard-hitting chops. Domingo shows up with his usual cinematic strings on "The MC," & Showbiz has more orchestrals for us on "A Friend." There's nothing wrong with the beats here, but it can't help but feel a little empty after Preemo's contributions to the last 2 records.
"I Got Next - Neva Hadda Gun" is about how you should stay armed to protect yourself from jackers. A few songs later in "Step Into a World," he cautions: "Steady packin' a gat as if something's gonna happen/But it doesn't, they wind up shootin' they cousin." From encouraging his listeners to "visualize wealth & put yourselves in the picture" to acting skeptical of money, from "Sound of Da Police" to discussing "A Friend" with whom he could be "cruising in the trooper car," the album is full of little contradictions like that, & I can't help but feel like it lacks focus. This brings me to my next, & last, point about KRS-One--one of my biggest influences as an artist & a listener, & a tricky conversation to have.
A Facebook friend commented on one of my previous KRS writeups & asked why I had not referenced his defense of Afrika Bambaataa. I told him that I have a lot of KRS to cover in this series (11 albums!), & I was saving it for the last one. Well, it's the last one! & it just so happens that my thoughts on that dovetail with my thoughts on this album. So here we go: KRS-One's name has been mud in certain progressive hiphop circles since 2016, when he appeared on Drink Champs & said, in reference to Afrika Bambaataa's child molestation allegations, "I don't give a fuck." He later backpedaled a little & said that he didn't mean that he didn't care if Bambaataa molested kids, but that he didn't care about unsubstantiated rumors. Setting aside everything that's wrong with that statement (the idea that all hearsay is created equal, for one thing, as well as the multiple corroborators & witnesses that make it disingenuous to call these reports unsubstantiated), I'm willing to grant, at least for the sake of argument, the most charitable interpretation of those words. What bothered me even more than the extemporaneous podcast soundbyte was what he said in another interview 2 months later: "This is what hiphop has to understand. Some of us are infallible. Some of us are going to have to be untouchable or our entire culture is going to fall."
Excuse me? Kris wants us to treat Bambaataa as infallible? This is completely at odds with his recorded stances on religion. He spent many years of his career preaching about what a mistake it is to blindly follow any faith--that is, until he became Christian. In 10 years he went from "If your slave master wasn't a Christian, you wouldn't be a Christian" to making a whole ass gospel rap album. But neither of these supports the idea of treating a human being--any human being--as infallible. Not to mention, as a student of history, Kris has to know what happens when movements stop holding their leaders accountable.
But this is nothing new for him. It's the same strategy that lets him be pro-gun one minute, anti-gun the next, & ambivalent about guns a few minutes later. The same strategy that lets him argue in favor of reparations in his book, & then write another chapter arguing against them. That's why he is so drawn to the study of metaphysics, because it deals with questions that will never have answers. But the reality is that there are lots of people for whom the truth value of "Bambaataa molested kids" is not a theoretical idea to be played with. As much as he says "show me the evidence & I will definitely have justice done," he doesn't want to know for sure. The existence of uncertainty is what allows him to treat it as an intellectual exercise rather than reckoning with the pain & trauma caused by the person he's defending. When your thought experiments disregard real people's suffering, I don't care who you think is infallible.
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