For the first time in more than a decade, stellar hip-hop has found a home on the album charts. Blame Kanye's Benz/backpack dichotomy, the gaping hole Jay-Z's faux departure left in word-centric rap, or a collective post re-election bump in the nation's IQ if you want, but drooling Lil' Jon-isms seem to be on their way out, and ornate production and lyrical dexterity are back in. For fans of hip-hop, this is very, very good news.
The trend started auspiciously enough with Young Jeezy's solid-steel Let's Get It, perhaps the funniest album ever made about slinging crack rock. Then came Lil' Wayne's Tha Carter II, on which the hottest of all the Hot Boyz stepped his game up in a big way. And 2006 has already seen Wu-Tang Clan's oft-forgotten genius Ghostface Killah drop the rancid funk of FishScale, currently the frontrunner for album of the year in any genre. Without selling out, each has sold well, and this resurrection of LP-length rap statements makes the "two singles surrounded by garbage" trend of the last five years feel like (hopefully) a thing of the past.
It doesn't take a lot to make a good hip-hop record from front to back. You just cut down on the high-profile guest spots, keep the slow jams to an absolute minimum and whatever you do, don't say "booty booty booty booty" more than 30 times in a song. But it's a far greater trick to make a hip-hop album great from start to finish: For that, you need talent. So you'll have to forgive my surprise that T.I. -- who once perplexingly referred to himself as "wild as the Taliban" -- could cook up 18 tracks of such inflexible quality as the ones on his latest, King. There's nothing in his back catalogue to suggest the runaway triumph of the dense, deliberate King.
On the surface, there doesn't seem to be much separating King from, oh, Dem Franchise Boyz. The splattered click-track beats and T.I.'s heavy drawl bear the distinctive mark of UGK, and it doesn't help that Bun B and company pop up on "Front Back" to further remind everybody who the originators were. But there's wide-screen aspirations to King's production foreign to the "louder must be better" aesthetic of crunk, and a fleetness to T.I.'s lyrical footwork that tops just about every non-Outkast thing down there. You can tell that T.I. put in some serious time making King a great record, and the effort paid off.
First (and maybe best) track "King Back" serves as King's mission statement, viciously taking doubters like myself to task by dropping some very hot verses over an undeniable apocalyptic blaxploitation-style funk backdrop. The scorching "Chariots of Fire"-synth driving lead single "What You Know" all but redefines the Southern rap aesthetic, and may prove to be the best single of 2006. While T.I. spits the finest hyperdrive rap since "Can I Get A...," producer Just Blaze once again tops himself on "I'm Talkin' To You." King loses a bit of its luster whenever it slows down; though T.I.'s getting better and better at pushing the pen, he's still not above mixing an odd metaphor or making overt reference to his own trillness. But at least 15 out of King's 18 tracks are practically flawless, and that'd be an achievement for any record.
I know arrogance goes hand-in-hand with hip-hoppery, but for years, T.I.'s been calling himself "king of the South" without the evidence to back it up. On King, he's finally earned his own self-aggrandizing title.
Grade: A-
