Minimal Jedi puns, well done everyone…
[Video]
[5.67]
Patrick St. Michel: The Los Angeles beat scene has produced some really thrilling music over the past few years: Flying Lotus, Teebs, The Gaslamp Killer, the list goes on. Thing is, the cosmos-bending production work coming from Brainfeeder and other assorted labels doesn’t sound good when actual rapping enters the picture. TOKiMONSTA has been creating excellent stuff for a while now, and the beat for “The Force” is right in her astral wheelhouse. But when someone tries to rap over it — even a legendary oddball like Kool Keith — everything just sounds muddled.
[5]
Iain Mew: The production, with its intricate beats and humming synths, has a lot of things going for it. The problem is that force isn’t among them. Kool Keith sounds beamed in from another universe from the beat, not just from convention.
[4]
Brad Shoup: It’s good to have Keith somewhere in orbit. This is not unlike Sun Ra managing the Lost Poets: slam-style delivery backed by handdrums dropping onto handdrums. What’s a G5 to the Millennium Falcon?
[7]
Anthony Easton: I thought it was a SF thing, but it’s taking police power against itself — which reminds me: for all of this goof and his flow, Keith is a strong political writer.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Aims for pacifism via silliness, between the moon-debris beat, the brass sample that sounds like it’s either been carbonated or liquefied, the various goofy deliveries of “I am the force”: one time grandstanding freshman, the next William Shatner, the next will.i.am. The problem with this sort of thing is it’s impossible to take seriously — but perhaps that’s the point.
[6]
Crystal Leww: This reminds me of Modeselektor’s excellent “Pretentious Friends” featuring Busdriver. That track is also a great beat made by a well-respected underground electronic producer featuring a rapper that’s been around for a while, which has a pretty large cult following but hasn’t had that much mainstream success. This is weirder and on more drugs. A lot more drugs.
[7]
Will Adams: One night of my freshman year, I tried a drink called The Force, which is an unholy blend of beer, vodka, and Country Time Lemonade Mix. It tasted how this sounds: a tinge of sweetness floating in between the bitter, but mostly muddy and indecipherable, and nothing I’d like to have again.
[4]
Josh Langhoff: Standard-issue dystopian weirdness, and I’ve spent way too long trying to figure out what kind of tuplets the conguero’s playing.
[4]
Ian Mathers: I don’t know why that percussion loop makes me so happy, but it does; it sounds dense and airy, crushing and bouncy, fitting for a song which sounds both toweringly monolithic and the perfect soundtrack for anyone who just smoked all of the weed — you know, like all of it. Kool Keith was the perfect choice to go with that production, or this production is perfectly crafted to accompany him, or however that went. The ending is a bit of a damp squib (I would have rather seen it go MASSIVE), but this is still very nice.
[8]