Train of Thought: Hip Hop will never be derailed! (HHAW4WO)

It’s not my style to review products that already have several reviews, but this is a special occasion.

Hip Hop Appreciation Week is once again upon us, and this year the theme is faith. So with the blessing of the Don of Epinions Hip Hop, SiGung Madtheory, please allow me to let you know about an album that restored my faith in Hip Hop and mankind, in general. I’m gonna go off on a bit of a tangent, so if you want to hop straight into the review, jump down six paragraphs. This review took me two days to write, though, so if you do skip ahead, f*ck you.

There is a theory that sometime in the future, we will reach what is currently called the End of Science. Those who espouse this theory feel that there is only a finite amount of information floating around in the universe and, barring an imminent mass extinction, Man will eventually know all that there is to know. There will no need for any more medical research, space exploration, or the chasing of any type of empirical, scientific knowledge, because there will be nothing left to learn. You can believe that if you want to. Man isn’t God.

But once the End of Science theory developed, another, similar theory was borne of it. Forgive me for not knowing the exact name, but it basically was the End of Science, theory, with art in place of knowledge. This theory says that artists (musicians, poets, sculptors, et al) will eventually run out of things to compose, write, sculpt, et al and will have to begin rehashing old concepts. Once this happens, art will become less stimulating and experience an irreversible decline in quality. It can be argued that this has already happened with music. Any “new” type of music is actually either a hybrid of existing types or an extension of an existing type. Even the Street’s Disciple has said “No idea’s original.”

So, at the turn of the new millenium, I had resigned myself to the fact that music, and Hip Hop specifically, had reached its acme long ago and that no matter how much creativity it exhibited or how much emotion it invoked, it would never quite reach the heights that it once had. Hip Hop has given us such gems as Liquid Swords, The Low End Theory, and the streets’ favorite, Illmatic. So it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that in order for us to have a modern classic, we would have to lower our standards just a smidgen, right?

“fhuoahfudkjadfowjewoijefohweuowe…” That’s how I talked for awhile, until I got my foot out of my mouth.

Along came Train of Thought, by emcee Talib Kweli and producer DJ Hi-Tek, collectively known as Reflection Eternal, dropping like a ValuJet over swamp land. It has shown us that a graph plotting hip hop albums on axes quality and time is not a parabola with its crest at the early 90s. That graph will continually rise and fall and now has at least two high points, the early 90s and 2000, because in 2000, the greatest album in the history of the genre was released.

No album in the history of Hip Hop has combined lyricism and musicianship into a package as complete as Train of Thought, a feat made even more impressive by the fact that the CD is twenty-one tracks long and well over seventy minutes. Most albums this long beg to be edited down, but to take even one track away from here would be a traveshamockery of epic proportions.

The journey begins with a brief spoken intro by Dave Chapelle who does an imitation of Nelson Mandela that actually fooled me for a long time. This leads into another spoken, unrapped interlude by Kweli who dedicates the album to several people including those “who came up and asked me when the album’s coming out and I said ‘When it’s finished.’”

Then the album officially kicks off and what follows is a clinic in producer/emcee chemistry. Kweli’s follow-up album, Quality featured a variety of producers and was excellent in its own right. But Train of Thought shows that Kweli has absolutely no business even thinking about creating music without Hi-Tek. They have a synergy that is undeniable and should not ever be tampered with.

Take second single The Blast for example, which is a sort of mission statement for the album. Here, Talib’s sublime vocals don’t just fit into Hi-Tek’s track like a sword in a scabbard. Instead, they blend with it like hydrogen does oxygen, and the result is more satisfying than ice water on an August afternoon.

Hi-Tek consistently puts it down like it’s heavy as hell, and no two tracks exemplify this moreso than Memories Live and Down for the Count, his two most potent contributions. The former is a minimalist, atmospheric piece over which Kweli reminisces and gives a very brief autobiography. The latter is the album’s most aggressive track and is perfectly suited for a battle track which is exactly what Kweli and guests Rah Digga and Xzibit create with it.

I’ve made the point before, though, that Hip Hop music is, at its heart, about lyricism. We have seen that bullsh!t lyrics over ill beats make a garbage album (Shyne). But we have also seen that a lyrical masterpiece with bland beats is still a classic album (Soul On Ice). So, without any disrespect to Hi-Tek, the onus was on Kweli to take this album over the top.

And he did so in a big way. Peep the second verse of Eternalists, which I can say, without hyperbole, has just about everything you could ask for in sixteen bars. There’s introspection, social commentary, chest-thumping braggadocio, and even a rhyme scheme that lasts for the entire verse. Peep Too Late on which Kweli laments the state of Hip Hop with laser like precision. Peep Love Language which sees Kweli breaking down the intricacies of love and relationships.

The number of topics covered here would even be impressive without Kweli’s touch. But his insight and mastery of the English language add an almost otherworldly, poetic quality to this product that has never been duplicated.

When Train of Thought reaches its boiling point, the result is one of the top five songs of all time, For Women. This was a concept created by Nina Simone, who would recite fictitious, autobiographical poems from the points of view of several different women, complete with costume and set changes. Kweli takes the idea, updates it lyrically, and flips it into four separate stories about four separate women. If you tell me you don’t like Hip Hop, I automatically know you haven’t heard this song. This is a paragon of how lyrics, concept, flow, and rhythm should blend.

Train of Thought is, quite simply, the greatest Hip Hop album of all time. And what we can learn from it, is music will continue to evolve and improve and Man will never reach the end of His artistic road. This is the album that restored my FAITH in Hip Hop and Humankind.

5 stars