Black Milk and the contemporary producer-rapper: A review of “Album of the Year” [Daily MP3 #116]

By Curt Busch [who -- uh oh -- is rap-geeking the shit out of The Gumshoe Grove's coverage (yes, I approve! - ed)]

The producer-rapper is arguably at the peak of its popularity. Rap producers, sometime around the turn of the century, started rapping and vocalizing themselves. I’m no rap historian (I was born the year Eric B. was the self-anointed president) but I’m looking at El-P’s debut in 1997 with Company Flow, Timbaland’s 1998 debut album and J Dilla’s 2000 classic with Slum Village as a shift in the spotlight, when producers more commonly began to do much of the rapping themselves.

Of course, producer-rappers existed from the beginning of the artform, but they usually had a great MC, picking up the rapping slack. Kanye West emerged from Jay-Z’s studio to become, possibly, the first superstar producer-rapper, and since, producers are doing it without rapper rapper’s helping them out.

OK, so that’s a bit demeaning, but really, did RZA ever hold up alongside Ghostface and GZA? Could Dre trade bars with Eminem or Snoop? No way, that would be like  Randy Moss throwing touchdowns to himself; you can’t do it all, at least on an all-star level. And so, with that overwrought, likely irresponsible piece of subjective music history, I conclude, clumsily, that great producer-rappers, with few exceptions (I’m looking at you El-P),  are producers before rappers, and Black Milk is the producer-rapper that got me thinking about all of this after listening to his fourth solo album, Album of the Year.

If rappers were cars Black Milk would be a Subaru Legacy. He’s steady, consistent, fully capable of carrying an album – he’s a good rapper, but he won’t wow with wordplay or switch up his flow. He won’t surprise or spit dense bars, but that isn’t expected; I mean, the guy’s making the music too! Born Curtis Cross, Milk came up making beats for Slum Village while still a teenager, certifying himself as the next great Detroit producer. He’s produced for his city’s finest rappers (which by the way, is arguably the best rapper city, per capita) and put out two borderline classic solo LPs, 2007’s Popular Demand and 2008’s Tronic.

Now 27 years old, Cross moves further away from his sample-driven backpack beats to a more live, studio-engineered sound on Album of the Year. He’s mostly traded his cold, electronic drums for a live kit and his golden-ear soul-loops for boisterous arrangements featuring mostly keys and strings. The guy is a good drummer, but too often, on tracks like “Oh Girl” and “Over Again,” he overdoes things, veering into high-school-jazz-band territory by the final two minutes. Many of the tracks end up sounding like vague, boring attempts at mid-’70s Curtis Mayfield (too satisfied), with none of the shivering hunger found on earlier works.

The dilemma is obvious: Cross is growing as an artist, wanting to try new things, following in the Kanye mold, too often forgetting his strengths — stone-cold, three-minute beats with the hardest drums and tightest samples in the business. Luckily about half the album works, and when it does, it produces beats you’ll be hard-pressed to surpass this year.

“Welcome (Gotta Go)” turns chilly Detroit electro into a sparse street anthem, and “Deadly Melody,” featuring motor city show-offs Royce Da 5’9 and Elzhi, is an obvious can’t-miss. “Distortion” is a dastardly funky cut, with wah-wah guitar lines and double-time drums, but at more than six minutes in length, drags on with indulgent experimentation.

Cross delivers his best rap performance with clever newcomer Danny Brown on “Black and Brown,” but then, in a WHAT-THE-FUCK move, cuts the rap at two minutes, lets the beat ride-out for another two, giving the listener nothing, and follows it with a vocal skit of a “hater” dismissing Black Milk as “Hollywood” and “stuck up.”

Thing is, I was thinking the same thing (!) and Cross probably knows this. It’s as if he’s reminding listeners he’s a producer-first; he can do what he wants, this is his album and he doesn’t have to rap or even let Brown spit another starving verse if he doesn’t want to. To me it’s a prime example of the album’s biggest folly: boring the shit out of the listener in the last few minutes.

I can’t help but feel more should be expected of one of the greatest producer-rappers in the game. However, when comparing Album of the Year to other producer-rapper works at the moment, he may be the only one holding up on both ends. El-P went the all-instrumentals route with his latest album, West is busy releasing feature-heavy singles with the biggest pop stars, Timbaland is lifting weights or something, The Neptunes (N.E.R.D.) seem busy modeling douche-y street wear, and Madlib, the Frank Zappa of producer-rappers, was really never interested in rapping without self-consciously shielding his voice in helium-like FX that he appears to have quit (see: Quasimoto).

In retrospect, I’m not in the position to complain about Album of the Year. It’s a good album. But no, it isn’t the “album of the year,” and it’s not even Cross’ second best.

*STREAM Album of the Year below*

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