KRS-One completes its "should have did this thing 20 years ago" album series with collaboration with Long Island rapper and producer Bumpy Knuckles aka Freddie Foxxx. It's the sixth collaborative tape with a New York artist (often producer) in four years, after those made together with Marley Marl ("Hip Hop Lives", 2007), Buckshot ("Survival Skills", 2009), Just-Ice ("The EP Vol. 1", 2010), True Master ("Meta-Historical", 2010) and Showbiz ("Godsville", 2011).
Freddie Foxxx is the lead writer behind the keyboards, King Karnov creates a beat, while the two rappers deliver bars for 57 minutes without the help of any guests. The choice of beats falls on the minimal boom bap, the music is more dynamic and lively than the other collaborative records of Teacha, with some g-funk influence and melodic rhythms.
The album suffers from an exasperated playing time and a fluctuating and erratic production, however, Bumpy Knuckles' imposing presence at the mic allows the product not to take the slippery slope already undertaken by Parker's other collaborative efforts, anchoring well to the ground in the midst of these thirteen tracks. The two New York-based MCs deliver bars on different themes, including socio-conscious, political, hip-hop, violence, past, in a way that hasn't been seen in a KRS-One CD for several years and that leaves a strange feeling: if you weren't aware that the album is recorded around 2008, it's as if for a moment, Parker had partly found the way he was missing after all these mediocre / bad releases.
This disk is published by an independent label when the attention of the circuit around KRS has run out. Freddie Foxxx, on the other hand, arrives three years after Fat Beats resurrected the legendary Westbury rapper's missing album, "Crazy Like a Foxxx", and arrives a year before the record with DJ Premier, which brings him back to the attention of insiders after years of anonymity. 6/10.
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