Talib Kweli Sticks To His Lyrical Roots On ‘Gravitas’ (XL)
Most artists in any industry will slow down as they get older, take more time between albums and projects as life’s other distractions tend to take on a bigger role. Someone forgot to tell that to Talib Kweli. The Flatbush-born MC has been on a tear over the past fifteen months, dropping a highly-regarded mixtape, Attack The Block with Z-Trip last September as an appetizer for two albums in 2013, May’s Prisoner of Conscious and Gravitas, which dropped Sunday. And all this after he released two more albums and a mixtape in 2011, bringing his output to six projects in three years. It’s a lot to take in.
The thing is, Talib Kweli has a lot to say right now. Each of Gravitas‘ eleven tracks casts an eye around the room and picks up something it notices, dissecting it with the same searing attention to detail whether it be the state of the rap game or the politicization of women’s bodies. With Prisoner of Conscious, Kweli bristled at the common perception of him as a “conscious” rapper; with Gravitas, he bristled at just about everything else. And he’d like to remind you, by the way, that he’s been doing this for a while: “Almost 20 years after the release of Soundbombing / And it still sound common / I’m out and on tour with the greatest / A Tribe Called Quest And the De La’s / Opened for Jay Z and Nas / Who else could say this?” he raps on “Rare Portraits,” a quick reminder that, with arguably his greatest achievement in Mos Def And Talib Kweli Are Black Star celebrating its 15th birthday this year, there aren’t many who have done it better than him.
Album opener “Inner Monologue” is a referendum on modern-day hip-hop, an age where “nikkas don’t get rich rapping, they selling clothes or liquor” [later, on "State of Grace" he'd get more explicit: "Rhyming is a memory / The assembly line rap nikkas is designed by the enemy / Stop giving them your soul, gift wrap / Prepackaged, fabricated shyt rap"]. But he doesn’t condemn that way of making money by going outside the established system. “The nature of distribution is changing… which is on the one hand intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating,” says a disembodied voice that couches the two verses and echoes Jay Z’s rationale behind his Magna Carta…Holy Grail release with Samsung earlier this year. “Nobody knows what the new rules are. So make up your own rules.”
Kweli’s always flirted around the edge of the mainstream hip-hop dance, preferring to shake hands with his friends outside the circle rather than jump in to the center of attention. He follows a similar formula here, grabbing features from Raekwon (whose verse on “Violations” is particularly excellent), Big K.R.I.T. and some punchy guitar work from Gary Clark, Jr. and sticking them on the same album as The Underachievers, Rah Digga and RES. It’s the same duality as with his two 2013 albums; Prisoner of Conscious had an iTunes release and EMI backing, while Gravitas was released exclusively through his own KweliClub website, where he’s trying to rewrite the rules of what a fanclub can be by giving each person who buys his album an account with a direct line to contact him. New rules, indeed.
One of the knocks against Kweli through the years has been that he’s somehow too lyrical, somehow too smart or seems too superior for the average hip-hop fan to soak in; that in itself is a reflection of the society that has grown up recently, where the person who shines a light on issues and tries to create change through conversation is the one cast as “strange” or just “other.” And if Kweli is not a “conscious” rapper then he’s very much one who makes an effort to stand up to society’s problems. On Gravitas, he avoids preachiness by couching his messages inside storylines where they can be more easily digested, a practice most obvious on some of the album’s best songs (“State of Grace,” “Demonology”) while mixing in a healthy dose of straight facts (“The Wormhole” and “Rare Portraits”) to support his narratives. He may still be too lyrical for some, but for many his Gravitas will be a welcome change from hip-hop’s current norm.
Source: http://www.xxlmag.com/rap-music/reviews/2013/12/talib-kweli-gravitas-album-review/
Talib Kweli once again grasps for his conscious roots on Gravitas (B-)
With his first album of 2013, May’s Prisoner Of Conscious, Talib Kweli indecisively attempted to reconcile his place in the hip-hop zeitgeist—a tall order considering that Kweli’s dense webs of internal rhymes and street-level social activism exists in a world where Rich Homie Quan’s “Type Of Way” inches ever closer to 22 million YouTube views. Regardless, the forefather of “conscious rap” enlisted a handful of mainstream-friendly collaborators (Nelly, Miguel, Curren$y, Kendrick Lamar) and genre-hopped across a collection of scattershot beats ranging from American Gangster-era Jay Z (“Come Here”), the futuristic R&B that seems to be ubiquitous these days (“Ready Set Go”), and a listless stab at hedonistic trap (“Upper Echelon”).
But for the most part, Kweli didn’t drastically change his approach to lyrics or production on Prisoner Of Conscious, instead opting to make small alterations to his usual hooks and beats in order to gain the attention of a new audience, all the while staying pretty close to his comfort zone. And considering it topped out at about 14,000 albums sold, with no single breaking the 500,000 mark for YouTube views, it appears as if the returns on his foggy attempt to inch toward the mainstream were minimal.
Kweli got to work on his second album of 2013, Gravitas, mere weeks after Prisoner’s release, determined to make an extremely quick course correction after a brief, hesitant flirtation with Hot 100 hip-hop. Gravitas promised a smaller, more personal exploration of Kweli’s travels through the rap game—a narrative that, according to his press materials, had never been heard before. This would theoretically allow him to recharge and refocus, providing listeners a peek into the headspace of an historically revered MC who’s approaching middle age (he turned 38 in October) and battling to stay relevant in a rap game that seems to be hurtling in a million different directions.
But, like The Beautiful Struggle and Eardrum before it, Gravitas finds Kweli doggedly mining lyrical and sonic ground similar to what can be found on his classics Quality and Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, grasping at compelling combinations of occasionally socially aware but guarded street-sharp rhymes over busy, percussive beats littered with refracted ’70s heroin-soul samples. It’s an extremely competent, energetic record that nonetheless feels like a photocopy of a great Talib Kweli record, one that loses the script on the emotional soul-baring that was originally promised.
That’s not necessarily the worst thing for a quickly made, transitional album that’s essentially a palate cleanser, especially considering Gravitas features a handful of tracks that stand up well, where Kweli and his collaborators are dialed in, going extremely hard over classic backpack beats, emotional nuance be damned. Jet-black banger “Demonology” rides the hell out of a particularly druggy guitar ring, while the Southern syrup of Big K.R.I.T.’s flow meshes impressively with Kweli’s nasal, quick-spitting East Coast lyricism.
Raekwon stops by on “Violations” to switch-hit bars with a bug-eyed Kweli and winds up laying waste to the hi-hat-smashing beat. And the staccato, gunshot drums, fluttering woodwinds, and strings of “Art Imitates Life,” produced by Kweli’s frequent collaborator Oh No, is almost unrelenting in its euphoria, lending even more energy to Black Thought’s crushingly cool verse (“Let’s toast to paid mortgages, lasting marriages / Living long, making my kids heirs and heiresses / The family crest, the legacy, the heritage”). In the end, the uneven, occasionally locked-in Gravitas finds Talib Kweli energetically exercising his artistry free of any agenda but his own, and hopefully positioning him for a true return to form next time around.
Source: http://www.avclub.com/review/talib-kweli-once-again-grasps-for-his-conscious-ro-200658
My favorite comment from the second review:
"It's a strange phenomenon: Whenever there's talk about Kweli doing this or that, everybody's referring to those glory Rawkus days. It's like Kweli records are never bad because they're really bad but because they're simply not like the old ones. Kweli's too conscious, too conformed, too whatever. But you have to admit: He's been one of the outstanding lyricists in the game for the past like 15 years. Beats were somewhat lackluster on some records, but as an MC, Kweli's undisputably (Hades correction: indisputably) among those who constantly try and succeed. There ain't going to be another Train of Thought. No Purple Rain either. Get over it and give the man a chance."
Most artists in any industry will slow down as they get older, take more time between albums and projects as life’s other distractions tend to take on a bigger role. Someone forgot to tell that to Talib Kweli. The Flatbush-born MC has been on a tear over the past fifteen months, dropping a highly-regarded mixtape, Attack The Block with Z-Trip last September as an appetizer for two albums in 2013, May’s Prisoner of Conscious and Gravitas, which dropped Sunday. And all this after he released two more albums and a mixtape in 2011, bringing his output to six projects in three years. It’s a lot to take in.
The thing is, Talib Kweli has a lot to say right now. Each of Gravitas‘ eleven tracks casts an eye around the room and picks up something it notices, dissecting it with the same searing attention to detail whether it be the state of the rap game or the politicization of women’s bodies. With Prisoner of Conscious, Kweli bristled at the common perception of him as a “conscious” rapper; with Gravitas, he bristled at just about everything else. And he’d like to remind you, by the way, that he’s been doing this for a while: “Almost 20 years after the release of Soundbombing / And it still sound common / I’m out and on tour with the greatest / A Tribe Called Quest And the De La’s / Opened for Jay Z and Nas / Who else could say this?” he raps on “Rare Portraits,” a quick reminder that, with arguably his greatest achievement in Mos Def And Talib Kweli Are Black Star celebrating its 15th birthday this year, there aren’t many who have done it better than him.
Album opener “Inner Monologue” is a referendum on modern-day hip-hop, an age where “nikkas don’t get rich rapping, they selling clothes or liquor” [later, on "State of Grace" he'd get more explicit: "Rhyming is a memory / The assembly line rap nikkas is designed by the enemy / Stop giving them your soul, gift wrap / Prepackaged, fabricated shyt rap"]. But he doesn’t condemn that way of making money by going outside the established system. “The nature of distribution is changing… which is on the one hand intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating,” says a disembodied voice that couches the two verses and echoes Jay Z’s rationale behind his Magna Carta…Holy Grail release with Samsung earlier this year. “Nobody knows what the new rules are. So make up your own rules.”
Kweli’s always flirted around the edge of the mainstream hip-hop dance, preferring to shake hands with his friends outside the circle rather than jump in to the center of attention. He follows a similar formula here, grabbing features from Raekwon (whose verse on “Violations” is particularly excellent), Big K.R.I.T. and some punchy guitar work from Gary Clark, Jr. and sticking them on the same album as The Underachievers, Rah Digga and RES. It’s the same duality as with his two 2013 albums; Prisoner of Conscious had an iTunes release and EMI backing, while Gravitas was released exclusively through his own KweliClub website, where he’s trying to rewrite the rules of what a fanclub can be by giving each person who buys his album an account with a direct line to contact him. New rules, indeed.
One of the knocks against Kweli through the years has been that he’s somehow too lyrical, somehow too smart or seems too superior for the average hip-hop fan to soak in; that in itself is a reflection of the society that has grown up recently, where the person who shines a light on issues and tries to create change through conversation is the one cast as “strange” or just “other.” And if Kweli is not a “conscious” rapper then he’s very much one who makes an effort to stand up to society’s problems. On Gravitas, he avoids preachiness by couching his messages inside storylines where they can be more easily digested, a practice most obvious on some of the album’s best songs (“State of Grace,” “Demonology”) while mixing in a healthy dose of straight facts (“The Wormhole” and “Rare Portraits”) to support his narratives. He may still be too lyrical for some, but for many his Gravitas will be a welcome change from hip-hop’s current norm.
Source: http://www.xxlmag.com/rap-music/reviews/2013/12/talib-kweli-gravitas-album-review/
Talib Kweli once again grasps for his conscious roots on Gravitas (B-)
With his first album of 2013, May’s Prisoner Of Conscious, Talib Kweli indecisively attempted to reconcile his place in the hip-hop zeitgeist—a tall order considering that Kweli’s dense webs of internal rhymes and street-level social activism exists in a world where Rich Homie Quan’s “Type Of Way” inches ever closer to 22 million YouTube views. Regardless, the forefather of “conscious rap” enlisted a handful of mainstream-friendly collaborators (Nelly, Miguel, Curren$y, Kendrick Lamar) and genre-hopped across a collection of scattershot beats ranging from American Gangster-era Jay Z (“Come Here”), the futuristic R&B that seems to be ubiquitous these days (“Ready Set Go”), and a listless stab at hedonistic trap (“Upper Echelon”).
But for the most part, Kweli didn’t drastically change his approach to lyrics or production on Prisoner Of Conscious, instead opting to make small alterations to his usual hooks and beats in order to gain the attention of a new audience, all the while staying pretty close to his comfort zone. And considering it topped out at about 14,000 albums sold, with no single breaking the 500,000 mark for YouTube views, it appears as if the returns on his foggy attempt to inch toward the mainstream were minimal.
Kweli got to work on his second album of 2013, Gravitas, mere weeks after Prisoner’s release, determined to make an extremely quick course correction after a brief, hesitant flirtation with Hot 100 hip-hop. Gravitas promised a smaller, more personal exploration of Kweli’s travels through the rap game—a narrative that, according to his press materials, had never been heard before. This would theoretically allow him to recharge and refocus, providing listeners a peek into the headspace of an historically revered MC who’s approaching middle age (he turned 38 in October) and battling to stay relevant in a rap game that seems to be hurtling in a million different directions.
But, like The Beautiful Struggle and Eardrum before it, Gravitas finds Kweli doggedly mining lyrical and sonic ground similar to what can be found on his classics Quality and Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, grasping at compelling combinations of occasionally socially aware but guarded street-sharp rhymes over busy, percussive beats littered with refracted ’70s heroin-soul samples. It’s an extremely competent, energetic record that nonetheless feels like a photocopy of a great Talib Kweli record, one that loses the script on the emotional soul-baring that was originally promised.
That’s not necessarily the worst thing for a quickly made, transitional album that’s essentially a palate cleanser, especially considering Gravitas features a handful of tracks that stand up well, where Kweli and his collaborators are dialed in, going extremely hard over classic backpack beats, emotional nuance be damned. Jet-black banger “Demonology” rides the hell out of a particularly druggy guitar ring, while the Southern syrup of Big K.R.I.T.’s flow meshes impressively with Kweli’s nasal, quick-spitting East Coast lyricism.
Raekwon stops by on “Violations” to switch-hit bars with a bug-eyed Kweli and winds up laying waste to the hi-hat-smashing beat. And the staccato, gunshot drums, fluttering woodwinds, and strings of “Art Imitates Life,” produced by Kweli’s frequent collaborator Oh No, is almost unrelenting in its euphoria, lending even more energy to Black Thought’s crushingly cool verse (“Let’s toast to paid mortgages, lasting marriages / Living long, making my kids heirs and heiresses / The family crest, the legacy, the heritage”). In the end, the uneven, occasionally locked-in Gravitas finds Talib Kweli energetically exercising his artistry free of any agenda but his own, and hopefully positioning him for a true return to form next time around.
Source: http://www.avclub.com/review/talib-kweli-once-again-grasps-for-his-conscious-ro-200658
My favorite comment from the second review:
"It's a strange phenomenon: Whenever there's talk about Kweli doing this or that, everybody's referring to those glory Rawkus days. It's like Kweli records are never bad because they're really bad but because they're simply not like the old ones. Kweli's too conscious, too conformed, too whatever. But you have to admit: He's been one of the outstanding lyricists in the game for the past like 15 years. Beats were somewhat lackluster on some records, but as an MC, Kweli's undisputably (Hades correction: indisputably) among those who constantly try and succeed. There ain't going to be another Train of Thought. No Purple Rain either. Get over it and give the man a chance."
