Black Milk – Tronic

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Mp3: Black Milk – Long Story Short (Feat. Dwele)

Mp3: Black Milk – Losing Out (Feat. Royce da 5’9″)

Mp3: Black Milk - Hell Yeah (Feat. Fat Ray)

If Black Milk drops a hip-hop album in the middle of the forest and nobody’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? It’s easy to see why late-2008’s Tronic didn’t bump out of speakers the way that The Carter III did last year, or the way Drake or Rick Ross (…or whatever) does now*. Whereas the mainstream is preoccupied with pumping passé 808 clickboops through laptop speakers, the beats on Tronic are claustrophobic, steroidal El-P-meets-the-Temptations thought experiments, based in organic drum and soul samples before gleefully ramping into cybernetic Moog-and-ProTools futureshock. They’re insanely inventive but also resolutely individualistic, which explains the ridiculous amount of quality spattered across the length of Tronic, but also the lack of commercial viability. In looking for comparative works, there’s Cannibal Ox’s quietly monumental Cold Vein, and Black is a vocal parishioner in the church of Dilla, but I’d like to draw attention to the similarity between Black and another producer.  He is, or at least was, smart enough to have a tangible and clever but mostly unobtrusive lyrical presence; his analogous use of a funk-soul foundation to build a definitive hip-hop temple was responsible for The Chronic, amongst others. Hint: it ain’t Rick Rawss.

* Oh and also by the way an interesting thing to think about is how the massive amount of videogames we all played as children – and thus, the massive amount of Super Nintendo clicks and boops we subconsciously associate with positive experiences like rescuing the Princess or forty-eight blocked shots from Shawn Bradley on the Dallas Mavericks (just turn Goaltending off) – maybe, on a case-by-case basis, created a positive predisposition towards clicks and boops in general that are now, currently, NOW, being recontextualized from the background music of our childhood into, like, actual popular music.

Wait, is that interesting? No. Nevermind. Resolved: Not Interesting.