Khujo Goodie's voice does not fuck around. It's one of the rawest flows to ever go abstract, but in the pieces of grit and gravel that line it you can still hear the meanings clearly. When that voice warns of an upcoming American Holocaust or accuses labels of perpetrating modern-day slavery, you believe it; when it delivers stories of unfair prison bids and deteriorating cities, you feel it. If any member of the Dungeon Family deserves the kind of commercial-slash-artistic breakthrough that made "Hey Ya" and "Crazy" inescapable, it's him, though getting Khujo to compromise himself to get it is out of the question. He'd need to roll with someone willing to take chances.
Enter Jneiro Jarel, the mind behind borderline-psychedelic underground hip-hop projects like Dr. Who Dat and Shape of Broad Minds-- a man who's been compared to Madlib and Flying Lotus, and a dedicated fan of Khujo's style who previously recruited him for a remix of SoBM single "OPR8R". That collaboration succeeded to the point where they decided to create their own surrealist supergroup, situate it in a fictional portmanteau of the two states the artists come from, and experiment with a few forays into underexplored turf. That makes Georgiavania defiant by design, one of those albums where a couple of creative renegades flip out over every stylistic possibility available to them, overextend their ambition, and still come away from it making its missteps sound exciting.
Not that there's a ton of missteps on this album, though-- more like some moments where you kind of wonder what they were thinking, give them marks for effort, and then find some strange appeal in it after the fact. "The Grussle" is one of those tracks that immediately slaps you upside the head with how audacious it is-- an Irish country-style fiddle melody combined with a slow-ride Southern bounce groove-- but once the novelty wears off it's easier to focus on its rhythmic slinkiness and how comfortable Khujo sounds in its odd environment. And there's a three-song stretch early in the album-- the gothic new wave "Loner", the Tunde Adebimpe-assisted electro-punk "Gawn Jet", and the shoegaze doo-wop of "I Didn't Mean To"-- where Jarel and Khujo go overboard in pushing hip-hop into places most people aren't ready for it to be taken; that they take it somewhere rewardingly unique is worth the risk.
Besides, there's still a bit of familiarity in the songs that touch on Southern-style hip-hop skewed just a little strange, and when that happens, it's an advancement in its own right. Khujo retains much of the same grimy consciousness that he mastered in his Goodie Mob days, championing his work ethic on "The Grussle" and snatching your breath with his empathy-stoking class-war struggles on the album-closing "In the Red" ("We know talk is cheap and closed mouths don't get fed/ But we starvin' down here, can you spare some bread?"). That Jarel can hang with Khujo on the mic is a pleasant surprise, at least for those who slept on him as just another producer. His Soulja Boy-needling performance on the title track and his doomsaying get-right warnings on "Prepare Fo It (Spiritual Gladiators)" follow some of Khujo's most liquid Mach 1 flows on the album, and he holds his own with a subtly Big Boi-ish smoothness that just barely hides some heavy-minded undertones.
With all this envelope-pushing, there'll inevitably be some excursions that don't entirely work. The woozy avant-soul "Violet Heart Box" sounds like an analog synth tribute to seasickness, and the spaced-out electrofunk of "Autopilot" feels a little weightless in those moments where Khujo's voice isn't there to give the rhythm more backbone. But they're more weird-confusing than weird-bad, and by the time they show up near the end of what's already been a startlingly original album, it's easy to accept failing at the unusual over succeeding at the ordinary. Hip-hop needs more albums willing to be this strange, and hopefully this is the one that gives these two artists some new, hard-earned shine.
