Description
See Mon 1, Chester French, for the Knux. Q-Tip’s The Renaissance hardly feels like the typical “event” project from a rap legend whose last release, Amplified, came out nine years ago. The record is refreshingly disconnected from recent movements in hip-hop: Other than “Shaka,” which contains an Obama sound bite, the tracks here might have been recorded at any point in the past decade. Beatwise, the new disc echoes the moodier, jazzy moments of A Tribe Called Quest’s twin classics, The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. The Cool Kids are a duo from Chicago that blends ultracompetent lyrics with pure beats. On tracks like “Gold and a Pager” they take seemingly cliché hip-hop topics and make them their own. Some call it “retro-rap,” but that doesn’t give the Kids enough credit for their original style. And of course, we’re partial to their early-’90s duds.