Scholar. Street philosopher. Triple Nobel Peace Prize victor. First black male to pilot an aircraft. Father of the Nike Swoosh. “The man that made Kool Aid say, ‘Oh yeah!’” So said Dave Chappelle, that hip-hop tastemaker with the 90-percent free-throw percentage, on the first track of Talib Kweli’s first album, Quality. Yeah, it was hyperbole worthy of ushering Xerxes the Great into court, but it reflected the rising Brooklyn star’s bottomless ambitions. While hip-hop has continued to stylistically mutate, Kweli has spent the decade and a half since as the vanguard for deep-thinking conscious rap. You can’t solve all the world’s curses—not even over seven solo records. But at least he’s given it a shot.
Album number eight, Radio Silence, is another solid Kweli release to add to the pile. He’s still bending the knee to the same soul-infused beats that contemporaries like Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco mostly abandoned sometime during George W. Bush’s second term. Kweli is still stacking cultural references on top of cultural references: The opening 90 seconds of Radio Silence alone see him citing, among other things, Back to the Future and Carlito’s Way, and rhyming “Sonny Carson” with “Johnnie Cochran.” And he’s still sometimes guilty of being a better thinker than music maker. Kweli’s flow can feel rushed and sticky, as though he can’t articulate his thoughts as neatly as he can conjure them up. But his fans are loyal. Radio Silence will comfortably shore up the base.
If the album is in any way shocking, it’s because of the topics that Kweli does not directly engage with. He’s long been one of rap’s most prominent social activists, using interviews and a super-prolific Twitter feed to advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement, address the escalation of white supremacy, and criticize the current presidency. On Radio Silence, Kweli only circles the topics, occasionally throwing out jabs—“Every problem can’t be solved at the ballot box,” he raps on “All of Us,” in perhaps the album’s most obvious reference to the administration—but stopping short of launching the big, direct haymakers. This is not a record distinctly of its era like, say, Common’s Black America Again or A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service—contemporary albums from artists that qualify as Kweli’s direct stylistic forefathers. Instead, these are mostly songs that could have been pulled from any era of his career.
There are, though, some very good Talib Kweli numbers. Radio Silence is a mostly a fresh tonic of brightness and positivity. “I live my life in the sunshine,” he raps on the lush, triumphant opener, “The Magic Hour,” without any sense of triteness; “I’m praying for a better tomorrow.” But over the bluster, Kweli still delivers his short sermons. “All of Us” slashes away with loquacious one-liners that cut deep: “The common myth is we’re savages with no history or accomplishments/Or knowledge of ourselves, they did a job on us.” There’s even room for a verse from the elusive Jay Electronica, who takes police brutality head on by evoking the image of cops beating an elderly woman. “Officer Friendly is an enemy now,” Electronica sighs, reminding everyone that his inability to sign off on an album qualifies as hip-hop’s own Greek tragedy.
The most focused effort is “She’s My Hero,” a song inspired by Bresha Meadows, the teenager who last year shot and killed her allegedly abusive father as he slept. Over a beat produced by Oh No, Kweli runs through the narrative with the storytelling elegance and human understanding of a skilled documentary maker. There’s more deep-thinking as Kweli drills into masculinity and the corrosive effects of negative male role models on “ Knockturnal.” But this is comfortable territory. We’ve seen him thrive on cuts like these dozens of times before.
A change of pace does come with “Chips,” where Waka Flocka Flame tempts Kweli onto some rattling hi-hats and brash brass. It’s a weird experiment likely to pique the interest only of those who are into weird hip-hop experiments—the muscular, anti-lyrical Waka teaming up with the new-age philosopher. But Kweli sounds less at home on the blustering beat, and the results are as mixed as you might expect.
“The One I Love” is the kind of rap-R&B hybrid number that was slid onto every commercial hip-hop release about 15 years ago and is totally fine. In fact, the album only occasionally slips out of “sounds pretty nice” territory. When it really hits its stride—like on the soulful production and funky flows of “Let it Roll”—it sure is good to have Kweli around. But a decade and a half deep, I’d rather hear him testing himself more. Risking defeat to go for the win is infinitely more interesting than always playing for the draw.
