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that was not the album people wanted, but...what else could you realistically expect?
(wrote a couple weeks after it dropped)
(additional disclaimer, this was the one interview sound was so bad I couldn't even pull quotes from. Learning.)
The state of expectance is a very interesting place to be in, and like all states depends heavily on the person experiencing it. Oftentimes, it is even so easily altered within an individual as to be rendered somewhat meaningless; high expectations can yield as excited and disappointed a reaction as low expectations. It's all circumstance. I came to Live from the Underground with intensely high expectations, only some of them having to do with K.R.I.T. If you've followed my coverage of Justin Scott to this point (and, if I may fellate myself a moment, it's likely you have considering I've been on the bandwagon as long as most) then you understand I probably had no real expectations for the album. I knew it would satisfy me.
What I was excited for was the chance to celebrate it's existence. I had the review assignment for PopMatters, I had the interview assignment for the same, and all I had to do was show up, do me. Expectations are a beautiful thing that way, the way they can teach you lessons. On the day of the interview (which I still have not listened to) I woke up five minutes late...this was an 12PM eastern call. Scrambling to call the Def Jam rep back, I rustled through a few notes I'd barely put together in the week and a half I'd had to prepare, heard K.R.I.T.'s voice crackle through the poorly-connected conference link and experienced the most robotic eleven minutes of my life. I spoke to Big Boi face to face in a cold sweat years ago, but this hungover phone conversation filtered through three different lines wasn't what I was ready for; I soiled myself.
Combined with the workload I've had in the real world, it came to the point the interview feature I'd planned to fold into my review due to its poor quality (again, through no fault other than my own) became so irrelevant I stopped fielding questions about it, a co-writer picked up the beat and turned in a very positive review of the album. This got me thinking about all kinds of things for all sorts of reasons, least of which being it was the first time PopMatters said anything about Big K.R.I.T. that my name wasn't attached to. After taking some more time to collect myself, my most prescient thought is of how one can expect so much of themselves, and understand how much is expected of them by others, and do so much to satisfy those desires.
The first time I was supposed to meet K.R.I.T. was October 2011 on the Jet Life tour, the one that featured Curren$y, Smoke DZA, Fiend and Method Man among many others (even without K.R.I.T., the showing I saw featured at least 10 rappers with 30 minute sets). He didn't make it due to personal reasons, and I loved the show anyway, but I was amazed by how many Omahans left the show when word started to spread K.R.I.T. couldn't make it, and a little disappointed that 30 minutes of live, on fire Method Man was my only consolation. Afterward I smoked a blunt with Shiest Bubz and talked about my interview with Fiend, about growing up to work and travel with heroes just because you hustled hard enough to achieve it. And now I sit here rambling about all of this because I just can't believe how badly I failed an artist, and a self, that I've been trying so hard to build into something special over the past two years and change.
But, whatever. Live from the Underground is here, and "Yeah Dat's Me" is on it, and that sucks but is what it is and so is the rest of the album. Which is fucking something. It's not his first two (Def Jam cosigned) tapes, the former of which had been in the making for nearly four years and the latter just stupefying. And it's certainly not 4evaNaDay, which was so laid back and subtle as to confuse folks into thinking it wasn't quite as incredible as his previous work. But it is a debut album, and undeniably so, from one of those artists who's worked the mixtape market fanatically and truly deserves it. Tracks like "Money on the Floor", "I Got This" and "Cool 2 Be Southern" have earned their radio leanings through K.R.I.T.'s pure force of personality. They feel bigger than what he's done before, but listen closely to the first half of the album and you really don't hear an artist trying to diverge from his mission statement, or fit in. He just wants to make it, and he's brave enough to try.
But it is hard to ignore for all the merit Live from the Underground carries in its back pocket that this is a different record from the King. We talked about this more in-depth than anything else (and I hope to finally go and pull those quotes that should have been in this review on Friday), about how he enlisted a close friend (Friend X, for now) to interpolate samples he loved, to sort of George Martin his abstract musical visions into actual statements. It's a sound that makes Live from the Underground feel organic in an entirely separate way from his largely sampled-based previous exploits. You certainly wouldn't have found such an explicitly Houston-radio track like "What U Mean?" on his previous works, possibly because it just wouldn't have fit in but also because of his love for finding inspiration in the music of the past, a trait that's really only allowed to be exposed through his shocking featuring of B.B. King here.
I suppose I could keep writing about this album forever, dissecting all the avenues by which I've come to hearing and understanding it. But the bottom line is that it's a very different, more accessible look from K.R.I.T., and to his unassailable credit he's met that ambition with more of the quality music that's come to be expected of him. The album is somewhat deliberately separated into two halves, with the (admittedly haphazardly executed) car jacking at the end of "My Sub Part 2" splitting one set of eight tracks of bragging, pimping and southern love from the other eight tracks of K.R.I.T.'s signature self-conscious Goodie Mobbing (this is a slightly - if not entirely - unfair delineation, but it works for word count purposes). More than anything, this isn't the UGK tribute K.R.I.T. Wuz Here was or the OutKast tribute Returnof4Eeva was, or even the conscious K.R.I.T. overload that 4evaNaDay was; this is plainly a Big K.R.I.T. album, and your ability to accept that on its own terms points in some ways to your understanding of what sort of artist K.R.I.T.'s been hoping to show the world he could be from day one. Depending on which side of the man you were rooting for to get a record deal this album could be a disappointment on the first spin or two, but if you understood neither side of the personality was ever supposed to dominate, then you're jamming the skip button every time "Yeah Dat's Me" comes up and loving everything else. Over and over again.
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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." © Jay Bilas
"I don't read pages of rap lyrics, I listen to rap music." © Bombastic
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz
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