Don't Sweat The Technique

Album review

Rakim's journey from young, hungry, speaker-kicking phenom to one of the most revered MCs of his generation was born out in four straight classic LPs with DJ/co-producer Eric B. And it's this last one under that dual billing that stands as their most intensely refined—a rapper at the height of his powers as a smack-talker, storyteller, and social observer, riding off production that stands as some of the golden era's hardest and hookiest jazz-sourced beats. "Know the Ledge" was the advance shot, a cut written for Ernest Dickerson's classic hip-hop drama Juice that does in four relentless minutes what the movie itself needed an hour and a half of Tupac's charisma to match; the combo of Rakim's powerful-yet-doomed protagonist's rapidfire narrative and his voice's interplay with the beat's coolly tense bassline is the kind of performance that forced emerging next-gen heirs like Nas and Jay-Z to set their standards up in the stratosphere. "Casualties of War" was a rare cultural outlier in presenting Desert Storm-era combat as a nightmare instead of a cakewalk, and the only thing more chilling than the way Rakim inhabits its returning soldier's post-traumatic paranoia is the fact that a rap track from 1992 absolutely pinpointed how the fallout from 9/11 and the Iraq War would feel 15 years later. While he also dedicates some deep focus to perceptive breakdowns of the structural rot and resulting desperation that led to gangster-as-hero culture ("Teach the Children," "What's Going On"), that doesn't preclude his ability to make a more convincing romantic than most lyrical-scholar types, too ("What's on Your Mind," "Keep the Beat"). And in "Pass The Hand Grenade," "The Punisher," and the pugilistic soul-jazz bounce of the title cut, Rakim personifies the show-and-prove excellence of someone whose metaphor-fusing lyrical intricacy can be an endlessly compelling subject in itself. © Nate Patrin/Qobuz