Hello! 😊👋
Welcome to a new edition of the Daily Music Picks newsletter!
Today’s music pick is a soulful piece of hip-hop myth-making centered around a complicated man wrestling with his past.
Genre: Hip-Hop, Conscious Hip-Hop
Label: Loma Vista
Release Date: June 16, 2023
Vibe: 😮
Coming 11 years after R.A.P. Music, Killer Mike’s last pre-Run The Jewels solo outing, the emcee’s latest LP is all about looking back and giving fans of Southern hip-hop a window into his musical and psychological DNA. It’s a complex narrative that’s both deeply felt and all over the place, partly because of the dizzying list of top-tier talent on a collaborator list that includes Andre 3000, Young Thug, Cee-Lo Green, 2 Chainz, Future, and his RTJ counterpart El-P, to name just a few. For the majority of its running time, that messiness is a feature, not a bug, as it allows Mike to build a savory sonic gumbo with hints of funk and soul, as well as a hefty pinch of gospel.
The narrative itself is as compelling as the production choices. Born into a family where both his parents were teenagers and one was a drug dealer, Mike is honest about his upbringing and, to a degree, the need for him to grieve for his childhood. Yet, and this will sound contradictory, but he does all of this without ever sounding like he truly lets his guard down. Take “Slummer” and “Motherless,” two introspective standouts that feature matter-of-fact bars about how he overcame what some would describe as insurmountable obstacles. Heavy hitters behind the board, such as Cool & Dre and No I.D. on those aforementioned tracks, respectively, give Mike plenty of room to set the record straight and re-establish himself as one of the great talents ever to come out of Atlanta.
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