I love hip-hop mixtapes. I also am fully aware that the vast majority of such mixtapes (even many of those put out by the rap game’s heavy hitters) are absolute dog shit and should be immediately forgotten.
But once in a while a true gem comes along. Like last month when the Mississippi-based rapper Big K.R.I.T. turned out what might be one of the greatest rap mixtapes released in a long time.
It’s called ReturnOf4Eva and it’s so good that calling it merely a mixtape is doing it a severe injustice. ReturnOf4Eva may not just be the mixtape of the year. It might be the rap album of of the year. (And in case you were wondering, K.R.I.T. apparently stands for “King Returns in Time.”)
Here’s one reviewer’s take in Blender Magazine:
Hearing ReturnOf4Eva was like living in a fantasy where Pimp C had never died, or where he had died but had first contributed some of his sizzurp-y DNA to a deranged scientist’s Build a Better MC project, where it would be spliced with André 3000’s melodic drawl and T.I.’s knack for stern-ass sermonizing. Is ReturnOf4Eva the best mixtape of the month? Yeah, but that’s not the half of it. I’d say it’s the rap album to beat in 2011 so far, but that even doesn’t do it justice.
So Big K.R.I.T., unlike a lot of other southern rappers, managed to get deeper than empty cocaine talk and actually put together an album that spans a huge range of emotional highs and lows. (In fact that’s a theme that pops up on a couple of the songs.) K.R.I.T. raps about his grandma. He raps about racism and greed. But don’t worry, it’s not all serious. Big K.R.I.T. wants you to know that he also quite enjoys receiving oral sex from groupies.
I also love that K.R.I.T. produced every track on ReturnOf4Eva. And these beats are tight as fuck, with a musicality that reminds me a lot of Big Boi’s last album. It’s actually kind of hard to say whether he’s better at rapping or producing.
So he sounds like the offspring of Pimp C, Big Boi, T.I. and David Banner while rapping about adult topics and producing all his own smokey-ass, crunked-out southern beats. And oh yeah, you can download the entire album for free (and legally) from K.R.I.T.’s own site. Go get it now.
Check out a few tracks below.
“Time Machine”
“American Rapster”
“Another Naive Individual Glorifying Greed and Encouraging Racism”
