Despite some initial drama—a botched release, a shuttered label—Blu & Exile’s 2007 album Below the Heavens quickly became a cult classic. Years later, it was hailed as a “magic album” and a tectonic shift that changed West Coast rap. The Los Angeles backpack rapper and Dirty Science producer have each had their own successes since, but they’ve never quite been able to escape the shadow of their massive collaborative achievement. The follow-up, Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them, was delayed five years, its name hinted at looming fatigue, and it sought to replicate the BtH palette outright. In the eight years that followed they continued to work together, producing shelved trap and electronic albums, but they were never able to “answer the call,” as Blu put it. That is, until Miles: From An Interlude Called Life, the worthy successor to their seismic debut.
Named, in part, for jazz titan Miles Davis (and dedicated to Miles Elijah Barnes), the album is about closing loops (musical, personal, historical), the pair’s long, exhaustive journeys through the underground, and tracking their roots in the process. “It felt like we had been miles away from where we started, and it felt like we had a lot to say about all those miles that we’ve traveled since we’ve begun,” Blu told Bandcamp. In many ways, Miles is like a bookend, not just measuring the distance traveled since Below the Heavens but also finding some semblance of closure. As a rhymer, Blu uncovers the contexts associated with words and finds where different shades of meaning overlap, especially with his name, and here he goes to the next level. He is optimistic amid adversity and adept at managing complex ideas, summed up by this lyric from the opener: “I don’t see the glass half full, I see the whole pitcher.”
Miles: From An Interlude Called Life finds a great rap bluesman, laborer, and journeyman thinking about what produced him and the nature of connection. In an interview with the Grammy website, Blu shared that Davis was his grandfather’s favorite artist, that despite always being around the songs, those vibrations didn’t reach him until he was in his 20s, and that getting into jazz through Davis opened his eyes. On “All the Blues,” he raps about naming his son Miles in tribute. The album features Blu’s childhood friend turned R&B star Miguel and Exile’s longtime partner Aloe Blacc, who introduced Ex and Blu in ‘03. In a clever bit of stitching, “Miles Away,” a song about going from city to city on the road, samples the Mos Def verse from “Travellin’ Man.” Many of the early verses are autobiographical, raw, and full of detail as he charts his path to rap through the people and places that molded him, and he shows how BtH helped open a gateway for rappers like Kendrick Lamar and Earl Sweatshirt. He has never been more approachable than he is on “The Feeling” and “You Ain’t Never Been Blue,” songs that navigate the emotional and financial woes of a working-class rapper.
The second half of the double album digs deeper into ancestry and shared history. It is a bit like Terrence Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life in its pursuit of an existential throughline; both weigh the experiences of the person against the larger forces that shape identity, exploring the relationship between the singular and the collective. Blu’s raps about growth and struggle lace into accounts dating back to antiquity—of soul music, freedom fighting, and self-discovery. Each of these threads is carried by Exile’s stunning, rich sample work, patching together themes about being Black and blue, searching, and learning from your pilgrimage. Miles doesn’t stray too far from the formula of their first two albums, but they feel more like diarists than classicists.
The nine-minute epic “Roots of Blue” is a generational survey of the Black civilizations that sprung forth from the cradle of life and how their descendants came to occupy America. The verses are dense yet rapped gracefully as Blu traces the diaspora back to the source; each verse unpacks a royal, spiritual, political, or musical Black legacy. He doesn’t just sound like he’s rattling off names or reciting facts; it’s as if he’s connecting dots. “African Dream” and “The American Dream” are like halves of a whole—the motherland fantasy against a capitalist fairy tale. Both are feats of imagination.
Miles is the rare 20-track, 95-minute album that mostly justifies its length. The scope is broad, and Blu weaves with skill between macro and micro. Some of his attempts to zoom out don’t cohere. On “To the Fall, But Not Forgotten,” an homage to the lost becomes a random roll call for celebrities as disparate as Kimbo Slice and Paul Walker. “Dear Lord” is like a COEXIST bumper sticker in song form. And on “The End,” he compares his album’s grand finale to famous assassinations, the 9/11 attacks, and the extinction of the dinosaurs.
But Blu is usually deft at pinpointing himself inside the larger narrative. The nostalgic “Music is My Everything” unfurls his own personal history of hip-hop—his cousin teaches him about basslines, his aunt dates Eazy-E, and his mother’s new reverend husband bans secular music from the house. His flows are fluid, his thoughts lucid, recalling memories as his route to rap runs parallel with the boom of the California scene. As with most of Miles, the firsthand experiences of its creators are presented as tiny pieces in a much grander mosaic, one spanning generations.
Buy: Rough Trade
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