Hip-Hop Albums of the Year

06 March, 2020

Kurtis Blow — Ego Trip


What swansong album rap would it have been for Kurtis Blow? One solid, certainly irregular, the boy struggles to keep up with the "new youngs" of the game, but the material is partly good — Run & DMC help in the intro: great boom bap jazzy skeletal, dark, heavy, with line of disturbing piano on the first hook and jazzy bridge with cheerful piano in the second, triumphant  thanks to the "AJ Scratch", and to the basketball ode in which Kurtis Blow drops some names in front of a soulful female hook ("Basketball") and an essential and tight jazzy rhythm, and the title track, which suffers less with an essential skeletal funky rhythm, jazzy tastes and a rapper delivery more inspired here than elsewhere. The remaining songs, R&B fillers without peaks, don't pay due to the uninspired delivery of the rapper: Kurtis wants to sing, still, always, forever. Take "Under Fire / AJ Scratch" as an example: the rhythm could also be decent with its tight and skeletal funky sound, and he delivers decently, but the track has little to do with the previous and the following, inevitably undermining the fluidity of listening. 7/10.

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