electric sadboi

(electricsadboi)

Sometimes music doesn't need to serve some higher purpose or be artistic for the sake of advancing the art. Sometimes it's there to aid by letting us have fun; who am I to judge it for things it doesn't aspire to reach? You call it kitsch; I call it camp and continue dancing like Lizzie McGuire and Ron Stoppable. (I don't want no smoke with Kim.)

I don't think anybody else but Common could have rapped over these beats. But on the other side of the coin, the tendencies of Common's penmanship feels like a part of him is still in the mindset that wrote "Like Water for Chocolate". That works some of the time, but not all — there are moments where the pockets that Common finds doesn't mesh with the experimental production that wants to find themselves in unconventional spaces. It's still a good record that ... read more

I often look at albums with spoken word the same way I looked at my grandmother's steamed and unseasoned broccoli. Every poem has its purpose; but even so, there needs to be a balance between accessibility and sophistication for that kind of prose to really stick its landing. In the case of understanding who Jill Scott is, I appreciate its bias toward the former than the latter; but its intermittent lack of sophistication resulted in the record feeling ever so slightly like a slog because ... read more

Evolution of the art by building something of your own that uses the work of one's predecessors as a foundation has always been a philosophy behind Black American Music. And I'd gladly point to this record as an Exhibit A; the musicianship, the production techniques, the arrangements — it's all a culmination of a deep and thorough study, and it's straight-up masterful and black as FUCK. Yes, the record might not position D'Angelo as the storied "Black ... read more