Big K.R.I.T. - Live From The Underground

Does ilx really not have a K.R.I.T. thread? Is this K.R.I.T. best release to date? Is it the best rap album of the year so far? So many questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CYkzgAu8PQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb-E3EuIfn8

yeah how is this

there was some talk on the goon thread about it being terrible...?

can you link to the thread? sure they weren't talking about his mixtape from earlier this year? i have a hard time believing you'd hate this album if you like KRIT at all. it's like the most big krit thing that big krit could possible release

like unless you think he attempts to sell out on it which is clearly ridiculous. and it's gonna be really annoying hearing that criticism get hurled because that narrative really appeals to people with him i think

there wasn't much talk and no one said it was terrible

I probably misread something

d/ling this now

it's not terrible. it's not great either... it's "good" in the way that most of his stuff has been "good" in the past few years.

this is what I was thinking of - ref'ing Cool 2 Be Southern I guess (which I haven't heard)

"are we living in some imaginary world where southern rap hasn't been dominant for like a decade" - some dude in the Killer Mike thread

This is why, totally off-topic, K.R.I.T.'s "Cool 2 Be Southern" feels a decade late and unnecessarily defensive...

― heiswagger (rennavate), Thursday, May 31, 2012 9:21 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i didn't say that, m@tt said it to me in a fundamental misunderstanding of my post. but haven't heart big k.r.i.t. beyond his b.o.r.i.n.g. singles.

― some dude, Thursday, May 31, 2012 11:29 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you dont like 'money on the floor' or 'we buy gold'?

― littledotheyknow (D-40), Thursday, May 31, 2012 11:56 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah both of those are amazing

def convinced that krit should more or less stop rapping

i think a ball & g album prod solely by KRIT would be in my top 10 of the year at this point

― fapper don (J0rdan S.), Thursday, May 31, 2012 11:57 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's way too many tracks on the krit album with him doing the repeat title a hundred times for the chorus thing. I actually like most of the smoother tracks, although Money On The Floor is still the best thing on it

― Number None, Friday, June 1, 2012 12:00 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, i definitely support the idea of him doing a ball & g album though

― Number None, Friday, June 1, 2012 12:00 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"cool 2 be southern" is pretty lame yeah

there's way too many tracks on the krit album with him doing the repeat title a hundred times for the chorus thing.

this is pretty important, too

Is this K.R.I.T. best release to date?

so far i still prefer 4eva n a day, but i've only listened to this one a couple times.

I can't even bring myself to care about this and I stanned for him around '09-'10.

"I can't even bring myself to care about this and I stanned for him around '09-'10.

― The Reverend, mercredi 6 juin 2012 01:34 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

p much

safe rap music, music for old people/minds, boringly good.

what's the "unsafe" rap music you have in mind? because i guarantee i like that shit too.

some serious "inb4, over it now" shit going on in this thread. dunno how you can say you ever stanned for his style but don't like this album when these tracks are clearly the most lavish, fully realized productions he's put to tape

i liked krit wuz here, i thought he had potential, he could develop, improve and become really good, he never really did though.

there seems to be a strange phenomenon on ilm, which runs counter to how most comment boards on the internet work, where people come in droves to proclaim their indifference on a topic. i suppose this is more true to life than everyone having extreme positive or negative feelings about everything, but it's strange.

it's sorta the response that big KRIT is getting from most places nowadays tbh

yeah i'm amazed he even got to release a major label album. in a way releasing an album when the buzz has died down seems like the worst possible thing for a rapper to do these days.

that he even signed to a major in the first place is kind of insane

eh the bar for getting a deal is pretty low

i mean from his perspective

i don't know what the financials were or whatever and so far his ride has gone smoother than most seeing as he's got an album out but i'm not sure why he thought that would be a good place for the kinda music he makes

what are you talking about, only like 5% of all rappers don't jump at any chance for a major label deal

I'll be curious to see how this thing sells though, when I stopped by a big chain to pick it up after work there was like 4 other people grabbing copies and two other dudes in line buying it. Ultimately meaningless, sure, but it seemed like sort of a "big deal" release today. It also had the primo placement even over Neil Young and Beach Boys.

i am totally calling BS on 7 people buying a big krit album at the same time in a best buy

Alright, I don't really give a shit if you don't believe me or not, but, tbh three of the dudes were together and were all buying a copy. They looked (and smelled) as if they had just come from the gym, so, I dunno.

Also, this was the Best Buy on Roosevelt in downtown Chicago, so it gets a little more traffic than your average store.

what are you talking about, only like 5% of all rappers don't jump at any chance for a major label deal

― shipl.de.al (some dude), Tuesday, June 5, 2012 9:58 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

no i know, and i wouldn't expect otherwise. but i do wonder if at some point someone is gonna say no. cuz unless big krit was gonna willingly go the b.o.b. route from the jump, i'm not sure what he thinks a major offers him.

well, for one thing, he probably wouldn't have had prime placement in Best Buys right next to Neil Young and the Beach Boys without a major label backing this one

yeah but that's a very small, short prize that i don't think is going to work out for him in the long run

once this one sells 12,000 copies in its first week it'll be the first and last time he ever has prime placement next to neil young and the beach boys at best buys

Probably true, but Curren$y still manages that prime placement too so, who knows.

i guess the one thing in krit's favor is that since he produces all his own music the overhead is prob pretty low

there really should be some kind of big physical product indie for all the KRIT/Danny/G-Side/Attrakionz dudes to go that serves as something between "major label ruining your album" and "mixtape existing only as poorly ID3'd 192kbps datpiff download"

XL should sign danny brown imo

I know Matador learned their lesson with the Arsonists or whatever, but like I'm sure all the Odd Future shit's been "successful" on the low level that XL or Fat Possum considers successful

XL should sign all these fuckin guys

Are there enough old R&B guys in need of a hipster rehab to pair all of them with though?

the point is that they wouldnt fuck with the records, dun

did someone fuck with big krit's album, though? from what people are saying it sounds like he got to make the album he probably would've made otherwise.

listened to most of this - at first blush pretty good, not quite as engaging as Return of 4eva

kinda tired of every rap album being discussed in terms of its place in the industry and the rapper's career. music, what's that?

did someone fuck with big krit's album, though? from what people are saying it sounds like he got to make the album he probably would've made otherwise.

― shipl.de.al (some dude), Tuesday, June 5, 2012 10:24 PM (40 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah, that's definitely true. and maybe def jam will cut him loose after this one but my point is that if he's signed for anything more than one album he's gonna be on the yo gotti train to hell pretty soon.

xxpost, yeah but it's gonna be a financial disappointment for Def Jam, where it would be a success for Fat Possum,

kinda tired of every rap album being discussed in terms of its place in the industry and the rapper's career. music, what's that?

― retro-shittified (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 5, 2012 10:26 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm a business, man

yeah, that's definitely true. and maybe def jam will cut him loose after this one but my point is that if he's signed for anything more than one album he's gonna be on the yo gotti train to hell pretty soon.

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, June 5, 2012 9:26 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dont know what this means

that he better enjoy this one album because if he's signed to def jam for anything more than one and they insist on holding him to that contract he's not gonna have an actual CD in stores until four years from now

ahh

i dont even know what major labels do any more tbh. it feels like such a different time

labels don't make every artist who doesn't have a serious radio hit sit on the shelf for 2+ years like they used to, but it's like maybe half of them now

yeah and Def Jam seems maybe more guilty of this than any other label the past few years. like, i'm envisioning some evil supervillian named Dr. Def Jam who just keeps trying to lock rappers in his dungeon

i don't think Def Jam's been especially guilty of that in a long time, certainly not before the 'plop out a Ghostface and/or Roots album every fourth quarter' era. i mean Jeezy and Ross took time getting release dates recently but that prob had more to do with the former having throat surgery and the latter having seizures and shit.

ahem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Good_(Nas_album)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The-Dream#Discography

maybe this is just my warped perspective but less than a year between first single and release date is not that unusual to me

i suppose that's not too unusual but it seems ridiculous when you actually think about it. and i was talking more about the endless pushbacks of the release date, esp in The-Dream's case

back half of this is better than the first (well except for Money on the Floor)

there's way too many tracks on the krit album with him doing the repeat title a hundred times for the chorus thing.
do people really have a problem with this? it's kind of standard for the sound he's going for.

i think the point is that krit doing things that are "standard" is kind of his downfall

i think i might have become an old person rap fan cuz i like this way more than most young rappers i hear these days. it's not ground-breaking or anything but it sounds gorgeous, most of the tracks have beats that really push my pleasure buttons. the two singles are two of my favourites over the past year and the rest of the album supports them nicely.

i grant that it doesn't feel massively exciting but i think this might be a function of krit's mixtapes having already provided us with as much krit as we really "need". the mixtape-to-album transition seems pretty vexed right now for a lot of rappers, either stylistically or just in terms of over-saturation.

i mean this is v much comfort food rap but that just means i'm more likely to listen to it more times than, say, the future album (after one listen i liked it, after 3-4 i'd begun HATING it) or the killer mike album (after one listen i was blown away but it's already starting to annoy me)

KRIT did 41k, no idea if that's a good number or not anymore. sounds decent, anyway.

pretty good for his profile/lack of radio play, i think

yeah, sounds about right

he's got NPR on lockdown though

Is this K.R.I.T. best release to date?

K.R.I.T. Wuz Here is a good place to start

I think Return of 4Eva is better but this is really good

production is super-lush

the production is really good... honestly you could kind of just jump into any KRIT album and not be able to tell the difference

return of 4eva is probably the best

All his stuff is so consistently good

K.R.I.T. Wuz Here is a good place to start

― Number None, Wednesday, June 13, 2012 12:50 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha i was reposting a part of the original post

imo 'the last king' is still his best, haven't heard this one tho

All his stuff is so consistently good

― la musica de harry frogbs (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, June 13, 2012 9:17 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark

this isn't true. the new one really blurs the line between "consistency" and "redundancy"

So have his last two.

otm whiney's tweet about how krit would be called the goat in the 90s was craaaazy

I mean he's "redundant" in the way like Too $hort and E-40 and Ball/MJG and Master P are "redundant" except he did like six albums in three years \o_O/

Like dude hasnt done anything NEW since "Country Shit" but everything he dropped since than has been solidly good. This new album is KRIT-by-numbers but is like 16 tracks great from beginning to end, and what other album this year can u say that abt?

except his personality is non-existent compared to those rappers, and their prods changed over time.

if these are 16 great tracks, i could say the same about more than 10 releases this year.

\o_O/

dude big KRIT is not on that level, fall back

he's a great producer, yes -- even the tracks on the album that i don't like at all almost uniformly have amazing beats

but he should stop rapping

i was thinking how amazing it would be if KRIT did a whole album for Devin

yes. or ball & j. or killa kyleon. or or or

ball & g*

devin sounds so silky smooth on a krit track

i'm gonna get killed for this comparison here but i put this album on the same level as J. Cole's -- dope producer, worth listening to just for the beats, but no personality or vision in the lyrics/songs

Krit has plenty of vision and personality - he doesn't always know what to do with it though. I generally prefer the early Krit of Krit Wuz Here and some of the earlier stuff to the post Return Krit. The early Krit seemed to use his music to sort out his problems and to get a grip on things in general - he is also a good storyteller with a great eye for detail. But from Return on he has seemed more interested in embodying some Quixotic idea of what Southern hip hop is supposed to be, frequently dealing in moral platitudes and far too simple dichotomies (highs and lows, lions and lambs, etc.) that turn his natural flair for the sentimental into something a bit too mushy. At his worst he is little more than a skilled but pretentious manipulator of clichées. I love a couple of the 4Eva songs though, stuff like Package Store and Red Eye brings back the personal narrator-Krit that had me intrigued in the first place. This new one sounds lush, but I still haven't really got into it.

"Cool 2 Be Southern" really is on some hilarious time machine shit

longneck super-otm

"Cool 2 Be Southern" might (miiight) make sense if it was like "Cool 2 Be Mississippian" or something.

what a nice young man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54vkg0kW9-o

but even banner broke the seal on mississippi ten years ago!

why don't he and Curren$y just do some superstar album collab

because the collective charisma deficit would create a black hole

:(

ahah

What does ILX think of Krit's new album?