Blu seems like the kind of rapper who's really proud of his DVD collection. I don't say this with any condescension or surprise; cinephilia might as well have supplanted graffiti or b-boying as one of hip-hop's four elements by the time Rae asked Meth where his Killer tape was. But it's clear from all the carefully assembled dialogue clips on Her Favorite Colo(u)r that Blu's interest in movies is just as personal as his ear for neo-backpack production and vibrant everyman-narrative rap. We get clips from Closer, Punch-Drunk Love, Buffalo '66, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou-- indie-canon stuff rearranged into a pastiche of troubled romance and teeth-gritting soul-baring. If there's a nerdcore for people who collect Criterion editions, Blu might've dropped its most essential release of the past couple of years.
Catch is, you have to go back those "past couple of years" to pinpoint when it was first released. Her Favorite Colo(u)r used to be a free mixtape back in 2009. Now it's an official release that costs the same as any other album you can get via online retailers. It can be dicey to run across an album on the pay-actual-money market a couple of years after it was offered as a no-charge download, and it might be even dicier when the main selling point-- an ostensible "remaster"-- threatens to defeat the purpose of the original article's charm. But reissue or not, this is the first widely available full-length Blu album to hit stores since he had a couple of great guest verses on the Roots' How I Got Over, and momentum's momentum even if he's advanced a bit stylistically in the two-plus years since this first dropped.
If this release feels a little slight, you could blame its EP length-- roughly 30 minutes. But a more identifiable culprit is Blu as he sounds on the mic-- or under it, or across the room from it, or wherever he is in relation to the mic that half-buries him beneath his own production. Exile collab Below the Heavens and his Mainframe teamup as Johnson&Jonson have proven how engaging he can be at length, spinning narratives where he duels with his own worst personal impulses and pits them against more ground-level, day-to-day concerns. But he doesn't assert himself much here, letting the sampled dialogue pick up the slack between rushed verses and a backgrounded mic presence. Cuts like "Amnesia" and "Since" have an introspective quality to them, but that does make them a bit less immediate. And if rap is all about performance trumping the page, Blu's lyrics here have the unfortunate tendency to scan a lot better on paper, though at worst that usually just means you'll need another few attentive listens to start catching the highlights.
At least the production does its best to make that task worthwhile. Aside from the whole Sundance vibe, the main draw of Her Favorite Colo(u)r is its dusty, lived-in feel, familiar loops of Billie Holiday and Jimi Hendrix and Curtis Mayfield worn threadbare and distorted into shitty-speaker resonance. And the remaster doesn't radically alter the album's original character for bad or good-- the bass is a bit crisper and richer, but the lo-fi dying-transistor/janky phonograph atmospherics of his production still register the most vividly. It's not the most revolutionary stuff; these dusty soul loops and chopped-up vocal refrains aren't as timely (or as polarizing) as the junglist Galaga headrush of Flying Lotus' beat for Blu's recent single "Everything's OK". But the lovesick noir vibe is compelling in the right mindset-- maybe humidity, alcohol, and regret are crucial prerequisites to getting the most out of it, but hip-hop production hasn't nailed the feel of scratched Formica bar-tops and dingy jukeboxes this well since the more reflective moments of Madvillainy. Cop this if you haven't, revisit it if you have, and consider it the Super 8 short-subject prequel to what should hopefully be a widescreen feature-length future breakthrough.
