The Knux
Remind Me In 3 Days
How often does an album pull off using heavy guitar work along with rap? Usually it's a bad sample, or it's just aggro-oddity--think that weird, not quite good, still somewhat entertaining "Just About Over" on Goodie Mob's Still Standing--not really rock, not really rap, but more of an amalgamation than the if-you-bring-it-up-again-i'll-start-crying "Walk This Way" ever was. It's not that they couldn't work, but they usually don't--for every second that a band like Dalek can pull off metal-ing up their sound, there's way too many minutes where Jay-Z is sounding like a goof while Linkin Park attempts to avoid using proper nouns. The Knux--a couple of nerds displaced by Hurricane Katrina--do more to fit a heavy metal sound alongside their De La Soul style rapping, and while it doesn't hit the mark every time, it, like most solid rap debut albums, is still full enough of "new kids trying to make a name" ideas for there not to be quite a bit of enjoyment found. Too many late-career hip-hop artists are currently either trying to hard to seem "innovative"--see Kanye and the weirdo choices he's making when he isn't busy threatening to break his computer--or they're trying to use the Obama climate as the opportunity to push the soapbox farther than their understanding of geopolitik allow--Hey Nas! The spot for "this shit is just straight banging" was left wide open, and while joke hacks like The Cool Kidz tried to fill it, The Knux pretty much (if you ignore Wale) won the title easily. It's not too say that The Knux is only good by default, that by comparison it isn't as good as previous masterworks, but to acknowledge that yes, it's official, even your mom knows by now: rap is hip-hop, hip-hop is music, and now that the sales and the merch have built the credentials that will keep a lot of people wealthy, the days when everything had a dash of new-ness to it is pretty much gone. Hip-hop--by weight of exposure and income--isn't the new kid on the scene anymore, it's the standard. Whereas other fields of study keep building--the growing attraction prominent musicians have for the experimental supergroup, the obsessive release digital schedules of underground savants and growing awareness of dubstep, dubstep, dubstep--rap can't claim anymore to be the unloved stepchild of the music scene anymore. The debate--a stupid fucking one that never should have gotten so much play--ended years ago, and now that all those "you should just listen to the blues and the blues alone, this ain't music" folk have finally started diving into their graves--see you in hell, Strom Thurmond--the scene has the opportunity for its masters to really start exploring what they can do with the rest of their music cousins. While The Knux idea--"we're going to churn out a lot of tracks, all with easily quotable lyrics and line it up with Red Hot Chili Pepper guitars and Clint Mansell style electronica (the PWEI stuff, not the movie scores)"--isn't a particularly new one, it's the ease with which they pull it off that makes Remind Me In 3 Days such a worthwhile adventure. While 2008 wasn't a year with major boundary pushing albums in the same way that 2007 was with Busdriver and Dalek, it was a year where rap took old ideas, cleaned them up, and made them work. When that happens, it's best to remember that it isn't always about being first. It's about being right.
-Tucker Stone, 2008
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