And speaking of rehashes, “Kendrick’s Interlude” is Section.80‘s “Ab-Soul’s Outro”, except Ab-Soul, who closes the song this time around, isn’t as visceral as Kendrick was, and he’s unable to put Terrace Martin’s beat to good use (recall: Kendrick Lamar’s voice and words became more visceral as the beat did, “I’m not the next pop star, I’m not the next socially aware rapper, I am a human motherfucking being, over dope ass instrumentation”). You can go ahead and cut “Closure”, a sung duet between Ab-Soul and Jhene Aiko that’s an obvious rehash of Control System‘s “A Rebellion”, the sung duet between Ab-Soul and Alori Joh, but with a less melodic punch. What’s the problem? At 90 minutes in length, it’s too long, obviously. Or, to borrow from one of Robert Christgau’s more poetic reviews, “He’s ready to blow on love rather than blow or a blow job He’s just a gifted kid who likes his weed and his words which he twists with palpable delight around sparse synth beats musical enough to layer on some delight of their own.” That being said, my heart sank when I heard follow-up These Days…, and this may very well end up being the biggest disappointment of the year hip-hop-wise, though I suppose it shouldn’t have been completely unexpected when you recall that Ab-Soul’s features on recent albums have been completely haphazard, from “Way Up Here” on Danny Brown’s Old to “Lakers” on Freddie Gibbs’s Pinata. On it, Ab-Soul revealed himself to be a completely different beast than his TDE label-mates, either in wordplay (see: “ILLuminate”), subject matter (“Terrorist Threats”) or, simply put, soul (see: “Book of Soul”). Control System was one of the best gems of 2012, a classic year in hip-hop if I need to remind everyone.
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