Twentieth studio album released by KRS-One. Production is mainly performed by Mlody, together with DJ Desue, Paul Laffree, Steez, PredatorPrme and KRS himself. Guests aren't accredited. The cover is the best from him since 1997, maybe. One of the best ever in his catalog. And perhaps the only really successful thing about this LP. Nothing else seems to work, starting with the mixing, which makes all of these 44 minutes annoyingly raw and poor. The production is wrong, the rhythms sound very bad most of the time. Rapping isn't completely inspired, it sounds dull.
The rapper mixes different topics in these fifteen cuts, including mental power, political themes, socio-conscious, pro-black, braggadocio, different battle rap tracks, themes about the power of the government, of the companies, on the fact that the government focuses on ignorant hip-hop and hiding socio-conscious and political hip-hop, like this one. That's for sure, KRS is right: if you go and look at the rap charts of 2017 and 2018, they're a manifesto to ignorance, they're dominant by ignorant artists or by guys who went crazy in post rehab after drug addiction. Of course, even avoiding any kind of promotion and marketing, in Parker-style, doing hip-hop on melodic and accessible music would perhaps help to find a larger audience, or does the government also control the mixing and your selection of rhythms?
If that were true, it would be really troubling. KRS states "the world is mind", a concept that he deals with almost exclusively in the last song, after a heartfelt tribute to several hip-hop artists who have crossed over to the other side: on the title track, he lets go of a single pretty simplistic verse to make his statement, however, the song isn't greeted by a good rhythm and its narration isn't effective. The tape is purely mediocre from start to finish, floundering in the middle, where some choices try to drown it in dirty and treacherously muddy mediocrity. 4/10.
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