Big K.R.I.T.
K.R.I.T. Wuz Here
This is a Southern rap album, produced by K.R.I.T. and given away for free. It's as professionally put together as any major label rap album, meaning it has some of their faults as well. (Probably a bit too long?) In keeping with the youthfulness and relative newness of the artist, the album's lyrics lean heavily towards brief autobiographical sketches of struggle, criticisms of contemporaries that are decipherable mostly to those steeped in scenes, and a song where the beat cuts out so that the lyrics can sound like intense slam poetry, perfect for histrionic declaration of purpose. The word "love" is used at times, but it's more reminiscent of the wasteland moralism of Steve Harvey than any genuine feeling. The beats on the album have a mongrel quality to them, never quite as retro as the faked datedness that so consumes new technology--it's all very clean, well matched to K.R.I.T.'s distinct enunciation of the words, all of which are vibrant and discernible. His voice is as much instrument as anything you'll find backing him up--it's a crisp thing, lacking in the sort of slur that one might find in Texan rap.
It's a weird piece as a whole. On the surface, everything is incredibly calculated. Clean, efficient sound tied to direct, easy-to-follow lyrics. But check this out:
"I sit alone in my four cornered room staring at candles, dreaming of the people I dismantled. I close my eyes and in a circle there appears the sons of bitches that I murdered." -The Geto Boys, Mind of A Lunatic
"I sit alone in this four cornered room, writing about life and how it goes too soon. Pimping these broads, fast cars and jewels! All in a blink of an eye, I could lose." -Big K.R.I.T., Good Enough
Out of all of K.R.I.T.'s influences, Scarface is the most prominent one, and while he's made claims towards an appreciation of Cee-Lo and Andre 3000 as well, it's Scarface that sticks the most. What does Big K.R.I.T. sound like most of the time? He sounds like Scarface. What does Big K.R.I.T. like to reference--obliquely, weirdly--throughout the album? He likes to reference Scarface lyrics, even if that means taking one of the most graphic pre-horrorcore pieces of pure gangsta rap and using it as a lead in to a song about, essentially, valuing what one has in preparation for its loss.
K.R.I.T.'s odd choices don't stop there, either--he samples an entire scene from the greatest sports movie ever made, and then goes on to describe personal qualities in direct opposition to what that scene meant. He makes bold statements regarding his own prowess--with women, with making money--and then undercuts them with apologies and rationalizations, only to follow those tracks with fictional stories about men with similar approaches to life, but without the need to defend against possible offense.
It's these qualities that, more than anything else, are what make K.R.I.T. Wuz Here graspable and alive, even great. Vocally, there's something initially exciting about K.R.I.T.'s sound, the way he opens the album with sharply edging the syllables of words like "return", or pronouncing "forever" in a way that ensures everyone will spell it "4ever", eventually leading up to the repetitive sound of "country shit, country shit, country country country shit", effectively making his vocals as much a part of the beats as the 808 sound he uses. (More than beat, it's the way his lyrics wrap around the sound that defines the shape of so many of these songs. "country shit" stops being a phrase almost immediately after that second or third time, eventually becoming the tone, the rounding, the message: this is a song for women to move to, so that men can look at them do so.) But the impact of efficiency wears off, or more accurately, it wears out--and that's when you start noticing the cloning of classic lines, the screw-ups in logic, the messiness of a young rap artist whose skill and style currently outpaces his knowledge of self. It's not his Sorrows of Young Werther, it's that plus his Portrait of the Artist, plus his Short Eyes, plus his fan-fiction.
It's banging, sure, and let's never go so far that we forget how much that matters. (Not to me, obviously. I'm a reader, and married. I don't even own a car anymore. Theoretically though, banging totally matters.) But at the end of all this effort, what resonates most is the mess that all the searching for self-realization leaves behind.
-Tucker Stone, 2010
Haven't heard this, hadn't even heard of it until now, but I'm looking forward to checking it out.
Posted by: Illogical Volume | 2010.12.17 at 03:50