Big K.R.I.T. has been playing around with the idea that he's a conscious rapper in a Southern rapper's clothes for a few years now. On songs like "Another Naive Individual Glorifying Greed and Encouraging Racism", he made it clear there was a Native Tongues revivalist knocking around inside him as well as a Texas-rap revivalist, and he seemed as good a candidate as any to fuse the two into something resonant and thoughtful. Neither scene had a whole lot to say to each other in their heyday, but now that they're both safely preserved in amber, there are some powerful dots to connect. Both relied heavily on warm, instrument-heavy tracks. Both were single-averse, album-statement-friendly forms. And both were excellent vehicles for humble spiritualism and the softer side of blue-collar wisdom. K.R.I.T. seemed to be finding his lane.
With 4 Eva N a Day, he already seems to be foundering in it. It's his first full-length statement since last year's Return of 4Eva, and it's one of the least distinctive things he's put his name on, a step backward into Southern-rap exercises that point you away from K.R.I.T.'s music and toward his heroes. None of it is bad, strictly speaking: K.R.I.T. produced all of it, and his production, even when it's in safe, UGK-template mode, is reliably spacious and warm, full of audible air. The chorus to "Me and My Old School" skillfully threads wah-wah guitars around a screwed and chopped vocal sample just like UGK's "Diamonds & Wood", and it's beautiful even as it remains stymied by the actual existence of "Diamonds & Wood". He tweaks the sunny soul vocal loop on "4EvaNaDay Theme" so that it pours out of the speakers like sunshine. K.R.I.T.'s ear for spacing samples and live instruments in a mix is immersive, and it exudes an easy confidence in itself that you rarely hear in K.R.I.T.'s rapping.
The problem with K.R.I.T.'s rapping is not that he lacks a personality; it's that he refuses to settle into the one he has. When he insists on play-acting like a heartless pimp, it doesn't suit him, and on 4Eva, his Pimp C impersonation has grown so slavish that it's downright distracting. He does not sound like the kind of soul who would be welcome, or comfortable, at a "Player's Ball", but he raps about it on "Boobie Miles", after sneering at the girl in his passenger seat as a gold digger. Some rappers can balance on the knife edge between consciousness and ignorance, but K.R.I.T. is not one of them. Not everybody can be Pimp C, and he muddies his image when he veers into this territory.
Worse is the vagueness that has settled into his reflective moments, which have always been where he shines. "They can barely hear the real shit/ In a world of fantasies, can you be a realist?" he demands on "The Alarm", without bothering much to elaborate. On "Country Rap Tunes" (about as imaginative a title for a Southern rap song as "Real Hip Hop" is for an NYC one), he insists that he "came from the bottom of the map to show/ That there's more to us country folk," and he sounds like a presidential candidate pitching aw-shucks normal-guy woo to an assembly of steel workers. With all his generic references to the Struggle, to Living Your Dreams, and to Holding Onto Your Integrity, K.R.I.T. sounds like he's already skipped past the Common of One Day It'll All Make Sense and landed at the empty, air-quotes empathy of Finding Forever.
There are still glints of the soul-searcher K.R.I.T. is supposed to become: "Package Store" renders an encounter with a diseased, corrupt preacher in one packed, memorable verse. "Red Eye" is a disarming love letter to an estranged girlfriend. But elsewhere, he sounds like a guy in danger of fading into his own record collection. 4 Eva N a Day might be a stopgap release, filled with leftovers, as he preps his major-label debut, Live From the Underground: let's hope so.
