There's a new wave in hip hop, and if My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy didn't start it, it was certainly the most prominent standard-bearer. Its an era where it's ok to try to do weird, experimental things, to dabble in electronics and rock and sounds beyond time, without being labeled a sellout. It's an era where making something truly beautiful is an achievement. And perhaps most crucially, rappers are allowed to be vulnerable, to be brought down by the same everyday problems that plague us all, crises of confidence and troubles with love and the ghosts of the mistakes we've made.
And all of that applies here, with noisy, emotionally resonant production driving you into yourself, providing escapism through rhymes and rhythms and textures and the feelings they evoke alike. It's some Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness shit, disarming and diverse and curiously affecting if you let it in.
Phantogram produces three songs and they're the album's best and most representative, swirling perfect bass and humm and synth and female vocals and chops into something unreal, with a backbone of right solid rapping to hold it all together. Elsewhere, She Hates Me delivers a post-Runaway autotuned confessional, matched only by Tremendous Damage's stutterstep, heartbroken R&B for quiet desperation.
The album is overlong, as rap albums so often are, but its stuffed with enough ideas that it might, believe it or not, justify its length. Mellon Collie indeed.
Is it too late for Outkast to get back together? There's a simmering longing for those days under the surface here. With all the growth as an artist Big Boi has shown, maybe he could take the lead and take some of the pressure off Andre. Dré as sidekick to Big Boi's future-blown masterey? It's just crazy enough to work 4.5/5
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