Cool, I've already heard both. Not an easy choice actually. I did not like Below The Heavens as much as I expected to, and I liked Swim much more than I expected to. That said, they are both more or less at the same level for me. I may have to listen to them again.
I'm trying to spend as little time on BEA as possible at the moment, but I told myself that I'd promote my nominations across the tournaments if I thought they'd need it. That said, Below the Heavens isn't even my nomination; however, it should've been (not in the sense that Puncture shouldn't have picked it, but rather that I nominated before him and somehow neglected to choose this album, despite it being the highest placed album on my chart eligible for this tournament. In that sense, I'm really glad someone did nominate it). As good as Swim is, I genuinely think Below the Heavens is one of the greatest albums of all-time, and a hip-hop classic. I've often pondered why Kendrick was able to succeed commercially where Blu wasn't - it seems to me that, in the boy Blu, the West Coast already had a naturally gifted young rapper capable of gaining universal appeal within its ranks. I've called Below the Heavens "my Illmatic" before, and I really don't think that's too high praise for an album I've found myself going back to in life as much as any other. So yeah, whilst I may not be around the forums as much in the coming weeks and months, I figured I'd wade in with a host of reasons as to why this album is so great, and hopefully do some serious convincing in the process.
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By 2007, Exile was already a veteran of the Cali hip-hop scene. Along with Aloe Blacc (yes, he of 'I Need a Dollar' fame), he was one of the men behind Emanon, an underground rapper-producer duo - in the mold of Gang Starr or Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth - who dealt in soulful, summery hip-hop. They had released two albums by 2005, and were responsible for one of the great forgotten hip-hop songs of all-time. Sometime around 2003, Aloe Blacc and Exile became aware of Blu, thanks in part to competitions for local upcoming talent. Exile was working on his first solo record and invited Blu to get on a couple of the tracks, though it soon became clear that the duo were destined for much more than that. Aloe Blacc even tried to shop Blu to the legendary Stone's Throw Records (responsible for the release of Madvillainy, amongst others), who told Blu that "they thought (his) music had the potential to be bigger than the stuff they did", and to "take a more mainstream approach (as opposed to) going underground with them". Ah, the irony; one can only imagine that, had Blu signed with Stone's Throw, he'd be significantly more well known than he is now. C'est la vie, I guess. Blu acted as a sort of hypeman for Emanon at shows around Cali (though Blacc remembers, "I never considered Blu a hypeman and I don't think Exile did either. We brought him on stage because we were seriously considering adding him to Emanon. We already considered him crew and felt comfortable letting him share the stage with us"), all the while working on his debut LP with Exile. This record.
Blu still remembers first getting into the car with Exile and hearing some of the beats he was working on, thinking, "am I real right now? Am I sitting in the car with the illest producer I've ever heard?", and apparently the duo had put together like three whole songs by the time the journey was over. By the end of the album sessions, they'd have around 75 songs done. In No Direction Home, Scorsese's documentary about the early career of Bob Dylan, Dylan himself laments a time when he was able to just reel off song after song with consummate ease, a talent he never really adjusted (completely, mentally) to losing. I like to think that Blu had a similar gift in 2004-2008, a seemingly endless pool of words and ideas to draw from and put back together at will. Exile, known for his "laid back soulful vibes", crafted beats that acted as the perfect foil for Blu's rhymes, a nimble-flowed, effortless mix of classic hip-hop braggadocio and conscious, age-beyond-his-years wisdom, as evidenced on the album's opening track 'My World Is...', a statement of intent for what was to come on the rest of the album.
"I told you if I wrote it I'm sticking with every cent of it,
'Cause if it goes down I'mma be sinking with my penmanship,
Just like a captain, and you can only imagine how much passion that I put in this,
For some magazine to try and rate me on how good it is?
Please fuck a critic nigga, this is my life."
'The Narrow Path' was the album's lead single and, according to Blu, "definitive of the record". It is both a deeply personal song ("tryna tell my folks that flowin' ain't easy, travelling down this yellow brick road until it frees me, I need a pen, I need a pad, I need a place to go, to get this shit lifted off of my soul") and a brilliant, if harrowing, summation of life in the L.A. ghetto. It also features one barely noticeable throwaway line that I really feel sums up hip-hop for many listeners on this site - "who cares if Blu rhymes about hoes or saving souls? They wanna hear that beat ride" - and is the sort of thing that rappers don't tend to admit; you see, in a rapper's world and his music, the rapper is paramount, the most important aspect of the song, the album, the genre, the world. For a rapper to recognise that a not insignificant portion of his/her listeners are more bothered about the beats than the lyrics is incredibly modest in the context of hip-hop, and representative of why Blu is so much more than your average lyricist.
"In this world that I'm living in
I've given into sex, stress, and dividends,
Los Angeles, metropolis, city of vexed citizens,
Folks that smoke infinite dope for hope, living in
poverty is probably the less stressed position to go,
So we don’t have positions to hold,
So we pitch snow and live in the cold."
'So(ul) Amazing' features possibly the most infectious beat on the whole album. It's soulful and joyful and features the best chorus vocal scratch snippets this side of DJ Premier; as Exile explains, "The scratches I laid on this song to me are my best scratch chorus work. If I do say so myself the ending is classic the way I scratched the M.O.P. sample saying, ‘It’s so amazing!’ The way I used the ‘zin’ and the end of the line to recreate Africa Bambatas ‘zin, zin, zin, zin, zin, zi, zi, zi, zi, zi, zen,’ like they did on the classic ‘Planet Rock’ joint." Lyrically, it's just classic hip-hop brag shit, but done as well as anyone ever. It never ceases to amaze me how many ways rappers continue to come up with telling the listener how great they are at rapping, but 'So(ul) Amazing' remains one of my favourite examples of this particular rap song staple. This song represents everything I love about hip-hop. It's a song I can put on at any time to cheer me up, and it puts me on top of the world.
"I flow krypton,
Knock Superman off his feet with his kicks on,
Niggas keep my shit on repeat,
And no matter which song I get on I shit on beats,
Pull out my dick and take a piss on trees,
I'm raw dogging it, look,
My rhyme lines flow sweeter than swine,
So any mic that I find, I got the right to be hogging it,
Talking shit, loud mouth, wild out, starting it,
Alcoholic slaughtering my vocab department,
So pardon if my talking is slurred,
Pants sagging, hands grabbing on my nuts,
Clutch, sparkin' my herb."
Another great personal cut, 'In Remembrance of Me', led to taunts from Exile that Blu was "trying to do 'Memory Lane'", the classic Illmatic cut. Illmatic has been called "the perfect record" by Blu, full of "immaculate imagery" and "potent lyricism", something I feel Below the Heavens shares with Nas' untouchable debut. But the reason I prefer this record to Illmatic is because of how open and personal Blu can be. Where Nas used abstract imagery and a real sense of time and place to convey his childhood, Blu hits straight for the heart with easy to comprehend language and an everyman appeal that Nas, amazing as he was and is, has never really had.
"We was full of youth, not yet abused by time,
It's like I saw the whole world through my rhymes,
Kinda crazy right?"
Something else that I love about Below the Heavens is the way it covers so many topics, so many rap staples, without ever feeling forced. As already proved, it has the listen-to-how-good-I-am-at-this-shit cuts, the this-is-what-it's-like-in-the-hood cuts, and the take-a-trip-back-through-memory-lane cuts. In that sense, it's reminiscent of another of Blu's favourite records (and one of mine too, actually), Jay-Z's The Blueprint. And, just as 'Girls Girls Girls' does on that Jigga record, 'Blu Collar Workers' works as the this-one's-about-the-females cut. A lot of people confuse adding variety to an album with taking away from the consistency or coherency of it, but this song doesn't feel out of place at all. It's still Blu being Blu, more personal than your average rapper, but still full of impressive boasts and quotables that allude to his confidence in his ability. And the beat kills it.
"It's hard to balance loving when you busting over beats,
Sounds strange but it's hard to explain it over beats,
In the lab daily, rocking two or three shows a week,
Going mad crazy, stressing over pressing and release,
Trying to please your label while you keep your rep up in the streets,
And at the same time trying to breath,
And on your down time, trying to find a fine breeze,
But see I'm underground so now I gotta find cheese,
Just to take her out to dinner, just to eat and get a kiss upon the cheek,
But for me it's even harder, 'cause I ain't got a car to pick them up in,
So chicks already think they put enough in,
Plus I'm kinda cute so it's hard for them to trust him,
Asking what I'm doing every night like I be screwing every night,
The truth is, I'm bruising every mic that I come across."
'Dancing in the Rain', 'First Things First' and 'No Greater Love' are three brilliant, melancholy, soulful tracks, again dealing with Blu's more personal side. They are symptomatic of the more subdued second half of the record, the highlight of which is the stunning 'Show Me The Good Life', featuring longtime friend Aloe Blacc. It's the tale of a scared father to be, trying to come to terms with looking after a child when he can barely look after himself, trying to come to terms with raising a child in the unfair streets of L.A. as mapped out earlier on the album. It's genuinely touching and sincere in a way that much hip-hop of this nature fails to be, and it never comes across as preachy, which is a trap rappers fall into all too often when trying to touch on topics of this magnitude. The fact that Blu pulls it off so successfully and so affectingly is probably the best proof I can give of his ability as a rapper, and the song is regularly used a prime example of this album's quality.
"I got a call from my girl last week,
She telling me about that time of the month and how it may not come,
Dropped the phone right before she said I might have a son,
And I started asking God how come,
I got dreams I ain't reached yet, ends I ain't meet yet,
When it comes to being a man, shit, I'm barely getting my feet wet,
Trying to hit reset, knee deep in debt,
Trying to figure out how to feed a mouth that ain't got teeth yet,
How the hell am I gonna show a child to be a man?
When I'm twenty-two without a clue on how to take a stand,
Against this system when it's just us, I wanna show 'em justice,
But last year I was just in cuffs,
What the fuck am I supposed to do when he's telling me, "dad, I need some food"?
I'm looking down at my stomach and mine is grumbling too,
What can I tell him when he's twenty-two
and he's asking me what the fuck I was thinking when mommy's tummy grew?
Was I scared, was I getting prepared?
Or did I even think of leaving her without a father's care?
Should I tell him that it's hell here and life ain't fair?"
Those are just some of my favourite songs from the album. As with virtually every album on my chart, I love each song on Below the Heavens. I implore all of you to listen to the whole thing. It's as personal a hip-hop album as you're ever likely to hear, not to mention damn fun. The beats are memorable and headnod-inciting, whilst the rhymes are equal parts touching, funny, and downright impressive. Blu raps as well as anybody when he's at his best, which is most of this album, and these instrumentals work as a cohesive canvas onto which he can paint his many minor masterpieces. I really like Swim, it's a cool record that encapsulates a sound and a vibe that has been extremely popular over the last four or five years, and it has some really good pop songs on it. But Below the Heavens is a genius, once-in-a-lifetime record. I've drawn parallels to Illmatic throughout this post, but Below the Heavens deserves that comparison and more. It's been both a blessing and a curse for its creator, a record so(ul) amazing that it puts Blu among the pantheon of truly great rappers, but also that all his subsequent work is compared to it unfavourably. Blu stated five years later that "I always wanted my debut to crack off like Amerikkka's Most Wanted, or Illmatic, or Doggystyle, and somehow God parted the clouds for me to do so with Exile." And, whilst he may be as cocky as the day is long, that's no overstatement. This record is one of the greatest hip-hop records of all-time, and as such one of the greatest of any genre. Vote for it.
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