![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() There are odes to Refrigerator Perry and John Gotti. Though thoroughly deserving, it felt like a stroke of luck when his 2005 album, Monkey Barz, became a sensation among underground and digital-native rap fans, cementing P as a rapper’s rapper who would snap other rapper’s rappers’ spines with his bare hands.Ĩ6 Witness is produced entirely by Philadelphia’s Small Professor, whose beats get cacophonous and heavy without losing their playfulness. Speaking of steadiness: From the beginnings of the New York–based ’90s rap crew Boot Camp Clik through 2012’s Mic Tyson - the last solo album to be released before his tragic death three years later - Sean Price was a force of nature. 2009 does conjure the year, but the machine keeps moving. But Curren$y is solid throughout - he locks in especially on closer “Forever Ball” - and at his semi-frequent best, Wiz plays up to the level of competition. It succeeds in fits and starts: There are pleasingly stoned songs like “10 Piece” and there’s the pulsing Problem collaboration called “Getting Loose.” But the tape is marred by rocky production (there are hammy drums and goofy synths) and occasionally lets Wiz sink too far into that pit of oversold, underwritten punch lines. Ten years after How Fly, 2009 aims to capture the bubbling nostalgia for early Obama-era rap. Wiz seldom feels part of the conversation, but has a better relationship with Maroon 5 than the rappers who do. 1 in “Black & Yellow.” In the years since, he’s drifted into a strange lane - one that runs largely parallel to the rest of mainstream rap, but which still allows him to sell out stadiums. But Atlantic pushed Wiz to the top of the pop charts almost immediately after announcing his signing, and by the time Kush & Orange Juice was 18 months old, Wiz had three top-ten singles, including a No. The best of these, called How Fly, paired him with Curren$y. MUSIC PILOT TALK TRILOGY SERIESBy the time he broke through, at the peak of the blog-rap era, with 2010’s Kush & Orange Juice (a good mixtape elevated by revisionism and nostalgia), the Pittsburgh native had already put out a series of promising records with winking titles like Flight School and Burn After Rolling. There’s a similar, though far lazier and far more profitable, mechanism at work with Wiz Khalifa. The Pilot Talk trilogy, his work with the Alchemist, and the slew of hazily poised songs scattered through RSS feeds for years on end made him a sort of cult hero. The New Orleans native has been kicking around since the apex of No Limit Records but established himself, in the latter half of the 2000s and throughout this decade, as one of rap’s most reliably good-to-great workhorses, churning out dozens of albums and mixtapes that are often inventive and always hypnotic. For backpackers and underground fans, it’s a must, but anyone who wants their hip-hop both a bit stranger and a lot deeper will fall hard for this one.It’s hard to romanticize consistency, but if anyone has been able to work steadiness into his own myth, it’s Curren$y. Much praise must be thrown the way of Ski Beatz, who handles all but two of the tracks here but still comes up with a varied set of productions that are both innovative and infectious. So many fast and smart rhymes flow out of the man during “Breakfast” that track demands repeat listens and when he sets the flippant tone with “I’m so sorry if I don’t look excited to be here/In your label office, but they said I can’t smoke weed here,” guests Mos Def and Jay Electronica follow suit, making “The Day” a prime candidate for underground rapper anthem of 2010. The key cut must be the spacy roller called “King Kong” where the rapper revisits his pilot obsession and talks of swatting them out of the sky with more precision than that ten-story ape (by the mighty “Address” he’s got “Crooks in my neck from watching all the jets”). In other words, it introduces newcomers to the Currensy mixtape experience, which isn’t a bad thing whatsoever. Currensy’s third effort came with wider distribution than his earlier two, but rather than act like a second chance at a spotlight debut, Pilot Talk is a featured-filled album with plenty of tracks that will be familiar to anyone who keeps up on their Internet leaks. ![]()
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