You Always Hurt The Ones You Love

“You bitch,” he said.

I had just finished reading to my friend at Atlantic Records the review I had written about his group, Little Brother, in the Washington Post.

“It’s a good review,” I said.

“No, it isn’t. It’s negative.”

“Are you kidding? I used the word ‘genius,’” I replied.

“Yeah, but you ended negative. Fuckin’ writers.”

Truth is, he’s right. I was much harder on Little Brother last week than I was on Lil’ Kim today. But the irony is that I’ll never listen to Kim’s album anywhere near as much as I’ll listen to “The Minstrel Show.”

Not that “The Naked Truth” isn’t a good album. It’s probably Kim’s best. But that’s not really saying much. Kim has always been much more important for who she is (the best female mc) and what she represents (a psychological tie to a dead icon) than for her music. But I didn’t have many expectations for “The Naked Truth,” and she easily exceeded all of them.

On the other hand, the Little Brother experience is all about expectation. They shoulder the hopes of hip-hop fans who long for substance, exactly the kind of thing we don’t get from Kim. But Little Brother, despite years of labor on backpack rap’s chitlin’ circuit, is still a bit like unripe fruit. They haven’t yet been able to do the thing that even Kim has done on her new album — write something anthemic (and by that I mean an anthem that transcends their current audience).

That being said, it’s Little Brother’s music that swims around in my head as I take the train or walk around the city. And I think if you cherry picked the best songs from their three albums, you could make an incredible one. But, perhaps to a fault, I expect more from Little Brother because I see their potential and their pretensions. I mean, if Lil’ Kim can write a hit record, Little Brother should be able to. Or else, don’t whine about the current state of hip-hop at all. Put up or shut up.

When my artists used to argue with me about whether or not a song was a “single” or not, they would go to lengths to defend their 32-bar verses and self-centered themes. And I would say to them, look, there are certain incontrovertible properties of the popular song that haven’t changed for hundreds of years, and hold true from genre to genre, whether folk or punk, ballad or street jam: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, motherfucker. And have something to say. Stray from that at your own peril.

That — in the long run — is what has created the phenomenon of “backpack rap,” and the whole schism between commercial and conscious hip-hop. Not some diabolical scheme to dumb down the music. But that otherwise intelligent artists, in their rebellion from the norm, have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. They think they’re rejecting formula. But they’re really rejecting law.

And no one is above the law, baby.