T.I.: King (2006)

(Atlantic)

RECOMMENDED

Atlanta's T.I. is one of those artists who makes it tiresomely difficult to be altogether dismissive of mainstream radio in America; his work is built to blast, pure ear-candy for anyone with any more-than-passing interest in hip hop, including but not limited to those who regularly decry the dire landscape of commercial rap. Probably all the more frustrating for those who bank their existence on the "album-length statement" is that to be properly understood, T.I. needs more than an hour of your time, and he actually uses that hour extremely well, which must drive the haters nuts if they ever bother to give him such an opportunity to prove himself.

To the cynics' credit, there was a point when an awful lot of stuff on R&B radio sounded like T.I.; I don't know whether he was the pioneer of the juggernaut-arena sound that correctly forecasted the mainstreaming of live performance as integral facet of mass-consumer hip hop. But "What You Know" is the single that will instantly spring to mind when describing the sound of the mid-2000s to someone. There's nothing live about it, of course, but it has the sound and battering-ram crowd-surfing intensity of a stadium concert that somehow manages to get directly in the face of all bystanders. There were fresher songs on the airwaves then, but few of them stand up as well as "What You Know," which still gets the blood running all these years later, and feels like it stands apart from its imitators and even predecessors in its straight to-the-bone perfection. It is, above all, a pop single. And pop singles can spawn pop movements; you don't have to give a whit for modern hip hop to get why it connected.

But T.I.'s intent with King probably wasn't to chase everyone else out of the room with the outrageous, the loud, the big statement. The record actually is rife with lower-key moments that are often its strongest; other big hit "Why You Wanna" runs a teasing wronged-man tack over a Q-Tip hook around minimal backbeat, and the amazingly effective love song "Hello" is built on such a classic formula of rap-n-soul, replete with Isley Brothers sample, it could be a Common single (and Common guests elsewhere on the album, proving himself surprisingly capable of a killer verse as late as '06). But others, like the stunning Grandmaster Flash nod "Goodlife," the breathless "Told You So," and the instantly classic closer "Bankhead" practically enter wall of sound territory. The heavy, chilly anthems are the reason the album succeeded, but people stayed for the oddball stuff, the ballads, the slowed-down and slightly eccentric back half.

Nice folks seeking consciousness rhymes aren't likely to find them here, even if the shit inevitably makes their heads bob; T.I.'s big motif, as recent headlines have made all too explicit, is drugs and everything about drugs: obtaining, selling, taking, paying for, charged for. And he won't win the Father of the Year award, either; "Top Back" announces "Think I'm bad now, shoulda seen me before I had children." He does compensate some for the eye-rolling misogyny inherent to so much hip hop of his time with some genuine, knowing, Prince-like romantic tenderness on "Hello" and "Why You Wanna." Just as importantly, the man gives a fuck about his craft, throwing himself into his rhymes and flow like few other rappers -- you can almost hear him break into a roar a few times; no casual apathy here -- and even when there's a touch of telling lack of detail or just tired trash talk in his lyrics, he chooses producers wisely and comes up with a consistently powerful, slick set that is full of artful surprises, excellent beats, and songs that catch and won't let go. Disregarding the four or five duds (all on the first half), every track here is memorable.

Those duds also tend to be the longest tracks; after an opening 1-2-3 punch of genius tracks, T.I. decides to bore us to deah with "I'm Talkin to You," which comes off like a low-tier recording of the Wu-Tang Clan members all shouting over one another, followed by the obligatory Jamie Foxx cameo on the dull "Live in the Sky." The agreeable throwback funk of "Ride Wit Me" picks things back up, and after that the only song that makes me reach for "skip" is the intolerably annoying "Get It." But I did say song. Rant alert: Anybody who loves hip hop will admit to you that the genre has its baggage like any other. The same way I hate most 103-note guitar solos, I am immensely irritated by the "skits" that come packaged with most rap records of all eras. Even the best of them are funny, at most, twice, and these tend to come on records that are worth listening to over and over and over again. It's a simple matter of programming -- usually. But T.I. commits the double offense of tacking skits on to the end of several tracks, including the perfectly ill "I'm Straight," which runs 6:35 thanks to a nonsensical obscenity-laced rant at the end. The phone call at the end of "Goodlife" is slightly less bothersome, and the worst of the bunch, a lovers' quarrel that precedes "Why You Wanna," is skippable. But with an album that's already about a quarter-hour too long, these are needless indulgences. I wish we could scale back the template a bit on these records, but maybe most folks like these skits, hell if I know.

With the real age of the gangsta long past us now, the hip hop world has become a sort of poetic apocalypse -- we've entered an age when the most exciting, innovative rap isn't necessarily the most fun rap. The problem is, as Mos Def has argued, both divisions of the music have value that's consistently undervalued by occupants of the other contingent. I'm a Roots guy myself; De La Soul and Run-DMC are still my favorite hip hop artists of all time. If I have to pick the current masters, I can't escape the cliché that Jay and Kanye are the kings because that'd be like saying the Beatles and the Rolling Stones weren't the kings in 1968. But I was listening to a lot of urban radio when this album came out and ultimately found that a lot of my resistance crumbled in the hands of the sheer rock & roll mastery of what amounts to an elevation of classic populist folk and blues. What T.I. is basically doing, whether he's boasting or lamenting a real injustice or bawling about some shit that's his own dumb fault, is what John Lee Hooker was doing fifty years ago. It's sometimes an ugly -- if catchy! -- world he and many of his peers seem to occupy, in the real world and on store shelves, but goddamn if it isn't as evocative an artful distortion-slash-representation of reality as pop culture has ever offered us. Testimonials about drug dealing and other unpleasant matters set to music this sick from talent this deep sure beats a Wall Street Journal op-ed about rap being mindless junk, doesn't it?