Stairway2Drew's Full Review: The Craft [Digipak] by Blackalicious
I can't say I ever expected it to happen.
In all of my years of reviewerdom - sporadic, ahem, as some of them may have been - there's one thing I've never done, and that's given anything less than a glowing, borderline-rabid review of a Blackalicious album. Granted, there's only been two Blackalicious albums for me to shower with those accolades, but they were two damn great ones. And hey, I may have never extolled the virtues of either in the most eloquent of ways - my Blazing Arrow review, for example, could be politely described as "shitty" - but they were recommendations all the same. Not "check it out sometime" recommendations, though - more like "you'll probably never lead a successful life without this album" recommendations. Yup, Blackalicious's first two albums are that good.
So, post-Blazing Arrow (now soundly one of my favorite albums _ever_), the two members of Blackalicious - MC Gift of Gab and producer Chief Xcel - still continued to put their talents on display for us; that Gab's album, Fourth Dimensional Rocket Ships Going Up, was so inferior to Chief Xcel's extracurricular collabo with labelmate Lateef the Truth Speaker, Ambush, made some seriously examine the Blackalicious dichotomy. Was Blackalicious the beats or the rhymes? Hip-hop music is largely rhyme-centric, sure, and Gift of Gab is one of the most fabulous MCs in the game right now; but without Chief Xcel's sharp, composer-like ear for beats sharper, more intricate, and funkier than ANYONE else's in the game - at his peak, Kanye and Pharrell have notadamnthing on The Chief - Gab's rhymes barely treaded water. Ambush was the converse, but not to the same extent - it was a success, while Gab's album was not - it _sounded_ like a mini-Blackalicious, and while Lateef isn't the MC that Gab is, he's still good, and Ambush was a pleasant little surprise.
Which brings us to The Craft. As album's go, it's pretty good, I suppose.
But that's the thing: I've never had to use noncommittal phrases like "it's good, I suppose" to describe a Blackalicious album. Blackalicious should, really, be to me what Jeff Buckley and Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen are: chances to allow my prose to overextend itself and become damn-near poetic, to aspire to writing like I've never managed to muster with anyone else. And if I were to rewrite my stink-stank-stunk early reviews of Nia and Blazing Arrow - and I will - they'd be fantastic, because I'd have an excuse to not just kinda describe the music, but to embody it, to show that, hey, here's an album so freakin' good that my writing "surpass[es] previous standards drastically" (to quote a Blackalicious song from a better album), and maybe that drives the point home a little more. With The Craft, I don't get that opportunity. And it's a good album, I suppose, but it still pisses me off. I wanted to write a freakin' epic on this thing.
In the abstract, The Craft is inoffensive enough. This isn't an album I'm ashamed to own (I'm looking at you, Nelly). It's not bad. I might even listen to it every now and again. Most the trademarks are here: we have Gift of Gab's impressive flow and vocabulary, Xcel's monstrous beats, an authentically old-school (yet forward-thinking) vibe. What The Craft lacks, then, is the scope and vision of Nia and Blazing Arrow. It lacks the attention Blazing Arrow paid to, ironically, the CRAFT of an album. Both of Craft's predecessors devoted ample time to both individual songcraft and overall album feel. The individual songs of The Craft all sound pretty good, if only occasionally exciting; where it fails, then, is sustaining an album momentum.
Look at it this way: earlier this year, Common re-schooled us in the art of minimalism as it relates to hip-hop. Hip-hop albums are never too short. They're always chastised as being too long, as having too much filler, too many guest artists, or too many interludes. Com's album Be brought it back - he reminded us that, hey, more often than not, great albums are just as long as they need to be, so here's one that's concise, that has just enough, that leaves you wanting more, that is 100% awesome, even though John Mayer's on it. Blackalicious's first two albums - and they were both great albums, if Blazing Arrow more notably so - were both long. And they were still great albums! That's the thing: usually, by putting the reins on ego and sacrificing quantity for brevity, an artist can make a better album, but Blackalicious didn't need to do that. They made two long-ass albums that didn't need to be shorter. That's .. that's really freakin' good, guys.
The Craft has some cool tunes on it. Really, it does. Things don't really get interesting until "Powers," Blackalicious's very own "Hey Ya!" Like a refugee from an early Prince album, "Powers" rides a funky drumbeat with grungy guitars, a funk-synth lick, and a chorus of background singers; more notably, Gift of Gab finally gets his sing on for an upbeat single-worthy song. (He sang on Blazing Arrow's "Day One," but while that's an awesome tune, he takes front and center here.) And it's awesome, and sounds like it stepped straight out of the old-school. Even better is the cheeky "Side to Side," which is really damn funny and plus we get to hear Gab share the mike with Lateef. Even "Black Diamonds and Pearls," one of a couple stabs at social commentary, is cool; the same can't be said for the track it follows, the clunky "Rise and Fall of Elliott Brown," which is neither illuminating, inspiring, or, well, good.
Most of the other stuff, sadly, is more miss than hit. "Supreme People," "Rhythm Sticks," "Your Move" - if they weren't interrupted by better tracks, I wouldn't know the difference. Xcel isn't even on autopilot here, 'cos Xcel's autopilot is usually better than other beatmakers' class-A efforts. He delivers stale funk on "Automatique" and "Give It To You," and do I even need to explain why a song like "Egosonic Wardrums" is bad? I mean, it's called "Egosonic Wardrums." "My Pen and Pad" is fun, a throwback to the days of "A2G" or "Chemical Calisthenics" in that it's a flexing of Gab's rhyming muscles, and "Lotus Flower" sounds like the fun little brother of Blazing Arrow's "Brain Washers" (plus it has the good sense to feature George Clinton), but come on, guys. I wanted to like this so much I even wrote the beginning of a review pretending that it was a minor masterpiece. I even used the term "minor masterpiece".
If somebody else had released this album, I might have been impressed. Perhaps that's unfair, but it's Blackalicious's own damn fault. They delivered us two albums of earth-shaking hip-hop, and then followed it up with something that's merely "okay." It's "pretty good, I suppose" at best. Maybe I'm just too demanding*, but that's not enough for me to really recommend. I'm gonna click "yes" for recommending this - I'm still too enamored with what Blackalicious has accomplished to really give up on them - but know that it's not a hearty recommendation. It's a half-assed one for an album that, sigh, is an artist's first inessential one. It had to happen sometime, I know, but dammit, I didn't want it to.
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