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When Funk Flex invited him to participate in his ongoing freestyle series on Hot 97 in 2017, the rapper seemed to take the opportunity as a challenge - a way to reassert himself as not only an ambassador of the culture but a lethal technician. The Roots released their last album in 2014 and followed Jimmy Fallon to The Tonight Show the same year, and a sense emerged that rapping might have become a secondary concern for Black Thought, admittedly a less ferocious presence at the head of a late-night house band. "Set within the complex soundscapes offered up by the rest of the group, Black Thought's liquid flow at times nearly washes away his meaning." "Sometimes MCs' flows can so dominate their styles that they overshadow other elements of craft," Adam Bradley writes of Trotter in Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop. Yet that asset can also be a strange kind of liability in hip-hop.
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Books on rapping have lauded his gifts as a performer: In How to Rap, Kool G Rap champions Trotter's breath control and execution in a Roots staging of his song "Men at Work." Watching the clip, you are immediately struck by the physicality of his recitation, how forcefully and consistently he rattles off phrases, like a boxer working a speed bag.
The Roots is also a live band, and moving through those arrangements requires a specific potency and stamina. The group is built around his indelible lyricism, but he has always been deferential to the collective, its ideas and organization. If there are two Americas, Trotter has straddled both, and Cheat Codes shares lessons learned during his travels, with a clear frame of mind that is new ground even for one of rap's peerless performers.Īs the voice of the legendary Roots crew, Trotter is both representative and accessory.
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Here, he finally locates himself within his songs: as a hometown hero who brought rap game theory to national TV yet remains cognizant of the Black struggle, who is trying to reconcile the world he's entered with the one he's from. As a soloist, Trotter has tended to write like a world traveler, making offhand references to the chupacabra or Bach, Amon-Ra or the hajj, his raps crowded but fluid as if he were sloshing on foot through a quagmire. Even as Black Thought the solo artist steadily took shape, his album - the album - remained elusive.Ĭheat Codes, Trotter's new collaboration with the producer Danger Mouse, is that quintessential Black Thought album, the one long awaited by diehards, the first of his recent projects to transcend his supreme skill as a rhymer and define his music beyond his intense technique. For a rapper in a group, it is also a chance to establish a fully independent identity.
But for most rappers, a proper debut album is a statement of artistic purpose.
The Philly rapper born Tariq Trotter had of course already displayed his otherworldly dexterity as frontman and co-founder of The Roots, and, beginning in 2018, emerged as a willing and capable soloist with a series of freewheeling mini-releases. It went by several names - Masterpiece Theatre, The Talented Mr. For many years, the Black Thought solo album felt like an imaginary object, long rumored yet never revealed.
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