Big K.R.I.T. - King from Creative Control on Vimeo.
BIG K.R.I.T. HOMETOWN HERO from Creative Control on Vimeo.
So as I wrote up here last week, I was traveling through the Northeast U.S. and Eastern Canada all last week. Before I left I uploaded a bunch of new music to iPod, including some tapes and albums I'd been ignoring. One of those was the Big K.R.I.T. tape from December that David Drake wrote up over at So Many Shrimp, The Last King. Drake's generally a great writer, but I have to say his review, while glowing, didn't exactly appeal to me, and I don't really know why. So I listened to the little Youtube freestyle posted there, didn't feel it, and then forgot about him until a couple weeks ago, when the "King" video dropped. It's impeccably shot, with a grimy, claustrophobic feel normally reserved for Motion Family videos (props to Creative Control for their amazing filming). But even moreso than the wellshot video was the track, a hookless, urgently spit track about hard times and grandiose dreams that caused me to sit up and immediately notice. After replaying the video 5 or 6 more times I finally grabbed the tape for my trip.
It turns out that tape was the thing I listened to the most on my trip, listening to the whole thing at least 7 or 8 times and several times since then. K.R.I.T. would like you to think he's a King, and he makes a damn good case for being one. The dude rhymes with such a ferocity and hunger it'd almost be cliche if he didn't sound so damn sincere about it. "King" is K.R.I.T.'s style in a nutshell: he talks a lot about growing up in hard times in Meridian, Mississippi, but also spits about his almost obsessive plans to get rich and feed his family. He also has a lot of time to throw around tracks about riding through his city feeling good, jamming screw tapes, and hanging out with his people. It's a 360 degree worldview; not just about hard times but also celebrating bits and pieces of the world around him.
Production-wise, the K.R.I.T. tape is impeccably mixed by DJ Break 'Em Off: the sequencing is great, and unlike a lot of mixtapes he doesn't let any idea run for too long. Check "Get Money", which runs the hook through 3 or 4 different iterations of the beat, never letting it settle or rest. According to K.R.I.T. on twitter, he produced "most of the tracks" on the tape, and he's an amazing beatsmith. He's also uses samples to great effect: the sample of dialogue from "Friday Night Lights" is incredibly effective on the above track, "Hometown Hero".
K.R.I.T. is the latest rapper to advance a growing thematic movement I've noticed (God that's pretentious), at least amongst my favorite rappers out of the South, in the last couple of years. Along with Playboy Tre, All Star, and a whole slew of Alabama rappers led by G-Side and Yelawolf, K.R.I.T. has been moving forth with, for a lack of a better term, something I'm calling "Southern reality rap". Over the last decade or so, it seems that a lot of southern rap has been more or less been drawn up in the blueprints of niche rap styles, so much so that you could virtually play Mad Libs with figuring out the latest rap trends simply by putting random words in front of "rap" (trap, snap, swag, bass, club, street, gangsta, etc). Of course, there are a few rappers that have refused to be comfortably pidgeon-holed by a singular style: the Dungeon Family's entire discography, Killer Mike's slept on albums, as well as the first Kanye West album immediately spring to mind. But more often than not, the best known and most successful rappers out of the South have been more than content to work a single sound or subject.
Not to discredit those styles, as dudes like Gucci Mane and Jeezy have made a lot of great music essentially by talking about the same subjects, but I'm really starting to prefer these observational, genuine storytellers that not only document what's going on around them, but then also forcefully place their own philosophies and ideas into the mix (i.e. G-Side's W-2 Boy movement). So often rappers easily avoid taking responsibility for their own music by saying "I'm just writing about what I see". It's encouraging to hear dudes say "I'm telling you what I see AND telling you what I'm doing to change that situation". You have to be a much better writer than Dorrough or Hurricane Chris to write about yourself and your values and not come across as preachy.
More often than not, as well, many rappers consciously keep a distance between themselves and the listener by refusing to place themselves into their music. Except, of course, on the token "conscious"/autobiographical track that seems to appear on every mixtape or album, which a lot of rappers seem to record only to throw out as a bit credit to say "yeah I really CAN rap about REAL LIFE" (seriously, how many bloggers have you heard defend Gucci Mane by citing "Worst Enemy" or "Neva Had Shit" to show HE REALLY CAN WRITE ABOUT THINGS BESIDES DRUGS?) But dudes like Playboy Tre never hesitate to put themselves right in the mix, freely offering up their own shortcomings along with pressing forward with the unmistakable swagger you need to be a rapper. I have no idea if the Liquor Store Mascot character Tre's built is truly reminiscent of the ~real Tre~, but the character is consistent and compelling as Kanye West was back when he was trying to figure out his own identity on College Dropout.
Real life is hardly ever the way music tells us it is. No matter where you live or what you listen to, that's almost always the case. Taylor Swift might sing about teenage boys and girls falling in like with each other, to the point that it might seem that ALL white middle class teenagers are doing in this country are lusting after each other from their bedroom windows, but that's almost certainly not the case. While it's a large part of growing up, it's certainly not the only part. Similarly, living in the hood is not all about selling dope or riding around in tricked out cars. There's a whole lot more going on there, and a whole lot of people that have never done either of those things. The dudes I've mentioned above are trying to broaden their scope to a cinematic level, showing us all people, from the D-Boys to the dudes hustling in school or college, to give us the image of life AS A WHOLE, not simply as a part to be fetishized and obsessed over. That's why I think it's appropriate to call it all "reality rap".
In a few songs this reality rap style can masterfully combine pieces of all those other styles together into one song, but this style is really better suited for albums or mixtapes in which the artist exerts a large amount of control over the tracks selected and the sequencing (DJ Burn One's concept of the "street album" in lieu of the mixtape is great for this style). K.R.I.T. has the extra advantage of being able to craft his own beats to fit his style, but G-Side's production team Block Beataz and All Star's collaborations with Burn One have also yielded great results. At any rate, it's clear that for such a mature and complex writing style to work over the course of an album, the producers and the artists need to have a pretty tight working relationship. Albums by these guys aren't DRASTICALLY different from the blueprint many other artists use: they have their club songs, their for-the-ladies jams, and their introspective jams. Weaving all of these styles together into a cohesive unit that actually tells us something about the artists behind those songs though, is something entirely different.
Below I've got links for tapes from Big K.R.I.T., G-Side, All Star, G-Mane, and Playboy Tre that I think best exemplify this style:
Big K.R.I.T.- The Last King
G-Side- Huntsville International
All Star- Live From the Back of the Class
G-Mane- Sunday on Da Porch
Playboy Tre- Liquor Store Mascot and Goodbye America
