Our look at the closing lines of reviews of the week's biggest new music continues with a look at the reviews of The Renaissance by Q-Tip, which lands in stores today:
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Q-Tip's The Renaissance has been granted an early digital release thanks to "the overwhelming demand from the online community," which is code for "it leaked last Saturday and we might as well try to stem some of the bleeding." [Billboard Publicity Wire]
Greetings from "at large"! Like any good penitent, my self-imposed blogging exile has included certain dietary restrictions. Fer instance consuming as little music released in 2008 as possible. But spending the day slopping about in music-related nostalgia is still OK, because otherwise I would have to turn to Jack Van Impe reruns or honest work. That's why this weekend, while Maura was taking in the horror what Fat Mike and/or the Get Up kids wrought, I was at the Rock The Bells tour, a package deal involving hip-hop's geriatric giants that is not a "festival" but a "hip-hop platform," presumably because it's easy for socially conscious rappers to steal juice from political terminology in an election year. We (meaning me and photographer Frank Hamilton) scammed our way in with Idolator's press credentials (and strategic puppy dog eyes), so the usual guilt meant I wouldn't be able to enjoy myself if I didn't type something up after the fact. (Plus Maura made me.) What did we learn? Well, for one thing, we learned that if your blog ass tries to stand on concrete in a "golden age of hip-hop" gulag for 12 hours, it seriously fucks your back up. (According to Maura's account from emo-ville, this is a pan-genre festival problem.) Two, that if our nation's enemies (except for those Iranian fibbers) had targeted Columbia, Md., with their nuclear whatnot on Sunday, they'd have evaporated just about every rapper that made my high school years tolerable. To wit:
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After having two albums in a row junked by his label, leaving him release-free for almost a decade, it's not surprising that Q-Tip would work up a list of collaborators that includes Norah Jones, will.i.am, Kanye West, D'Angelo, and Barack Obama to help guarantee that his new album, The Renaissance will actually see the light of day. But just in case you think he's going to settle for sure things here on out, he's already promising that the follow-up will be helmed by Nigel Godrich, known best for building Jeep beats for Radiohead, Pavement, and Travis. "He's just on some real hip-hop [stuff]. It's gonna be a lot of sampling," says Tip. "He's really dope!" Yeah, you've never been wrong before about that. [The Guide]
According to the New York Post, future popular-vote winner/Supreme Court-mandated loser Barack Obama is going to appear on the next Q-Tip album. Yeah, that's right, Roots. The best you could get was Patrick Stump? Q-Tip hasn't released a record in nine years and he gets the maybe-next-president!
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Idolator
