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Ab soul best album1/25/2024 ![]() Ab's record is an exhilarating real-time document of that process.Īll of the Black Hippy full-lengths are powerfully internal experiences: To spend time with Kendrick's Section.80 or Schoolboy's Habits & Contradictions is to walk around wearing that rapper's head on top of yours for a while. "I used to wanna rap like Jay-Z, now I feel I can run laps around Jay-Z," he tells us matter-of-factly on "ILLuminate", and I think of Lil Wayne explaining why he called himself "Best Rapper Alive" on Dedication 2: When you are busy mastering your craft, you should absolutely feel like you are the best at it in the universe. But Control System booms with self-possession and confidence. He is probably the member of Black Hippy who has spent the most time in a headlock. Ab-Soul is the only member of Black Hippy from the suburbs (Carson, Calif.) he throws around terminology like "paradigm shift" in his lyrics. Can Kendrick outdo perfection? We’ll see.Now here's Ab-Soul, speaking for himself, on the opening track to his resounding new full-length Control System: "Said I was the underdog/ Turned out I was the secret weapon." The album opens with a quote from Janet Jackson ("This is a story about control/ My control"), and Control System similarly feels like a young artist discovering his voice. To say the very least, this is the greatest TDE album produced, and possibly the best they’ll ever do. Just when people had somewhat given up on how Hip Hop has been presented over the last few years, this was that album that made us proud to be not only Hip Hop lovers but fans of world-changing music. ![]() Black consciousness met up with jaded fame and self-destruction on this generational album, and with cuts like “How Much A Dollar Cost”, “Mortal Man”, and “U”, Kendrick painfully puts a mirror up examining those areas that we as a culture need desperate help with, while never ignoring our power and pride on uplifting cuts like “Complexion” and “I”. Without question, the leader of the new school, and possessor of Hip Hop’s new landmark is Kendrick Lamar Duckworth. City, and with To Pimp A Butterfly, he was crowned ‘King”. We got introduced to the new young jack on The Kendrick Lamar EP, a rising impressive talent on Overly Dedicated, a prodigious songwriter and emcee on Section.80, a new west coast savior on good kid, M.A.A.D. ![]() The introspection and depth on this album is as human as anything you could possibly hear on wax. This Grammy Award-winning monument changed the entire landscape of Hip Hop in 2015. With an album that stands as one of the single best TDE projects to this day, we knew there was something very human about this young emcee, and it bled all over this exceptional album.ĭo I even need to continue? What else can I say that hasn’t already been said about this timeless piece of music? The most important Hip Hop album of our generation, and certainly the most impactful in over a decade, is the new standard of greatness in Hip Hop, and we have Kendrick to thank for it. To make the loss even more heartfelt, we hear her angelic voice on the tracks “Empathy” and “A Rebellion”. Truthfully, we haven’t heard a more depressing, yet beautiful, dedication to a lost loved one in many a year, over one of the most melancholy melodies ever heard. Incredibly poignant and at times heartbreakingly personal, Ab-Soul makes us confrontational with “Terrorist Threats”, made us think and read with “Pineal Gland”, and made us cry with his deeply somber and painful eulogy to his late girlfriend, and TDE artist Alori Joh, “The Book Of Soul”. Experimenting with different flows and showing versatility, he quickly became considered every bit of a star as Kendrick.Īs good as Longterm Mentality was, and how nicely we got fully introduced to this thinking stoner, it was this magnificent album that really let us know just there’s a lot more to this Carson native than drugs and getting high.Ĭontrol System shows us a conscious young cat who was in tune with the corruption of the world, as well as other areas such as love, loss, and his own personal health. While we were still in awe of Ab-Soul’s Longterm Mentality album, he dropped his next album, Control System. ![]()
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