Here's what Schoolboy Q said about Ab-Soul, the least visible member of the Black Hippy collective, when I interviewed him for Self-Titled magazine last winter: "I write a line, and I bring it by him. He's like my actual human dictionary when I'm in the studio rapping." Black Hippy alpha Kendrick Lamar told Andrew Noz something similar in last February's issue of The Fader: "When I first met [him] I thought he was a nerd. A nerdy, wizardish genius." These two aren't slouches in the eloquence or intellect departments: To hear them speaking with hushed reverence about Ab-Soul was interesting, to say the least.
Now here's Ab-Soul, speaking for himself, on the opening track to his resounding new full-length Control System: "Said I was the underdog/ Turned out I was the secret weapon." The album opens with a quote from Janet Jackson ("This is a story about control/ My control"), and Control System similarly feels like a young artist discovering his voice. Ab-Soul is the only member of Black Hippy from the suburbs (Carson, Calif.); he throws around terminology like "paradigm shift" in his lyrics. He is probably the member of Black Hippy who has spent the most time in a headlock. But Control System booms with self-possession and confidence. "I used to wanna rap like Jay-Z, now I feel I can run laps around Jay-Z," he tells us matter-of-factly on "ILLuminate", and I think of Lil Wayne explaining why he called himself "Best Rapper Alive" on Dedication 2: When you are busy mastering your craft, you should absolutely feel like you are the best at it in the universe. Ab's record is an exhilarating real-time document of that process.
All of the Black Hippy full-lengths are powerfully internal experiences: To spend time with Kendrick's Section.80 or Schoolboy's Habits & Contradictions is to walk around wearing that rapper's head on top of yours for a while. Wearing Ab's head proves to be a particularly intense experience: "You should see the shit in my cerebrum," he tells us on "Showin' Love", comparing his synapses to "lightning" at another point. Being an "actual human dictionary," Ab hasn't chosen these words lightly: His lyrics reel from wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing (at one point, Hitler's face appears in the burning Twin Towers) to egg-headed abstractions (Sumerians, Saturn, third eyes, Andromeda) to powerful, lucid observations. Ab sums it up neatly for us on "Track Two": "Just imagine if Einstein got high and sipped juice/ Broke rules, got pussy, beat up rookies on Pro Tools," he offers. Oh, sure, one of those.
This cerebral/visceral friction is one of the most satisfying elements of Black Hippy, and Ab-Soul arguably carries it the furthest of the group. There is a song called "SOPA" on Control System, named for the Stop Online Piracy Act; Ab-Soul includes a pointed lyric about Trayvon Martin in his verse. But the beat, which shudders and lurches like a dying car, will make you scrunch your face and jerk your limbs like you are suffering neurological crisis. Schoolboy Q is on the song, too, and he would like you to know that he fucked your girl.
The song "Terrorist Threats", meanwhile, is prefaced by an incendiary quote from the documentary Slavery By Consent about imprisonment through debt. The beat sounds like the world’s loneliest single-person ping-pong game, being played in an abandoned car garage. "If we could link up every gang/ And niggas is willin' to bear the pain/ We could put the White House lights out today," Ab-Soul barks, an echo of Dead Prez's "run up on them crackers on the White House lawn" call to arms. But what is that Jhene Aiko is coolly chanting in the background? A paraphrase on the "spit yo flow" hook from Jay-Z's "Nigga What".
Ab sees politics everywhere, even in the drink being mixed up in front of him ("Hennessy and coke, 1800/ We mixin' dark and light like the 1800s," he quips on "Bohemian Grove".) But politics are never all he sees. "Genius idiot, best description of myself," he raps on "Showin' Love", and over the hour-plus course of Control System, he touches, lightly, on almost everything: heartbreak, cockiness, righteous anger. On "The Book of Soul," he tells of being diagnosed with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, the origin of his unlikely nickname "Black Lip Bastard." On "Beautiful Death," he assures us that while we die as individuals, we will rise as a nation. On the song here actually called "Black Lip Bastard", he accuses other rappers of "eating yogurt in bed." By the time it's over, he still sounds like he's only getting warmed up.
