Read deliberately, Prisoner of Conscious isn’t that much less provocative a title in 2013 than Nas' Hip Hop Is Dead was in 2006. We're now a little more than three years removed from Waka's infamous "I'm not into being lyrical" comments, and about two and a half on from Flockaveli, a willfully boneheaded album approaching classic status these days. Talib Kweli, then, isn't cut out for these times. Songs like 1998's "Definition" and 2002's "Get By" still deserve all the adulation they inspire, but there's a reason the 37-year-old founding father of conscious-rap is now acknowledging his own antiquity. So when third song “Turnt Up” shows up on Kweli’s fifth solo album, it's probably right to perceive it as an allegorical jailbreak.
And, unfortunately if predictably, “Turnt Up” marks the beginning of Prisoner’s issues. The song knows what it wants to be but doesn’t have the wherewithal to be it. Its piano-lined, uppercutting pop aims for the radio, but, not even factoring in the club-unfriendliness of Kweli’s nose-pinched delivery, I just can’t imagine it fitting in next to “Fuckin’ Problems” or “Bugatti”. The track might be the only flail at relevancy here, but when guys like Kendrick and Miguel show up-- the former laying down one of his best guest verses of late on “Push Thru”, the latter as seductive as ever with his suitably come-hither-y hook for “Come Here”-- their appearances scan as misguided attempts at lending the album a vaguely populist hue. For a record that doesn’t have a binding identity in the first place, that’s a regrettably fragmenting problem.
As great as the jutting, soul-sampling production of 2002’s Quality was, Kweli’s saving grace has always been his well-intentioned lyricism, not his taste in beats. But Prisoner is marred by weak analogies (“colder than Minnesota,” “buzz like Georgia Tech) and Kweli’s bumpy writerliness (“ornithology” and “onomatopoeia” are just two less-than-melodious words used here), leading this to be his most underwhelming record yet word-for-word. And for every few lines that actually do stand up to some of Kweli’s smarter work (“Black Moses when the mic is on/ That’s why these rappers scatter like roaches when the light is on”), there’s a half-cocked concept, like this one from “Hamster Wheel”: “How she runnin’ the streets but still standin’ still/ She needa get up off the hamster wheel.”
Listening to Prisoner next to something like the new Chance the Rapper tape reveals the record’s biggest, most pervasive dilemma. Where Acid Rap is a seamless convergence of local and post-regional sounds, Prisoner takes on a bunch of things one by one without squeezing the most from any of them. Kweli’s absolutely owned his lane when he’s been committed to it but now he's jumping around from style to style with no destination in sight.
