Radio Silence is a mostly a fresh tonic of brightness and positivity. There are, though, some very good Talib Kweli numbers. Instead, these are mostly songs that could have been pulled from any era of his career. Thank You 4 Your Service-contemporary albums from artists that qualify as Kweli’s direct stylistic forefathers. This is not a record distinctly of its era like, say, Common’s Black America Again or A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It from Here. On Radio Silence, Kweli only circles the topics, occasionally throwing out jabs-“Every problem can’t be solved at the ballot box,” he raps on “All of Us,” in perhaps the album’s most obvious reference to the administration-but stopping short of launching the big, direct haymakers. He’s long been one of rap’s most prominent social activists, using interviews and a super-prolific Twitter feed to advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement, address the escalation of white supremacy, and criticize the current presidency.
If the album is in any way shocking, it’s because of the topics that Kweli does not directly engage with. Radio Silence will comfortably shore up the base. Kweli’s flow can feel rushed and sticky, as though he can’t articulate his thoughts as neatly as he can conjure them up. Kweli is still stacking cultural references on top of cultural references: The opening 90 seconds of Radio Silence alone see him citing, among other things, Back to the Future and Carlito’s Way, and rhyming “Sonny Carson” with “Johnnie Cochran.” And he’s still sometimes guilty of being a better thinker than music maker.
He’s still bending the knee to the same soul-infused beats that contemporaries like Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco mostly abandoned sometime during George W. But at least he’s given it a shot.Īlbum number eight, Radio Silence, is another solid Kweli release to add to the pile. You can’t solve all the world’s curses-not even over seven solo records. While hip-hop has continued to stylistically mutate, Kweli has spent the decade and a half since as the vanguard for deep-thinking conscious rap. Yeah, it was hyperbole worthy of ushering Xerxes the Great into court, but it reflected the rising Brooklyn star’s bottomless ambitions. “The man that made Kool Aid say, ‘Oh yeah!’” So said Dave Chappelle, that hip-hop tastemaker with the 90-percent free-throw percentage, on the first track of Talib Kweli’s first album, Quality.
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