Between the headphones
Freeway,
So, I've kind of drifted away from rap music lately. (Note: I will never call rap "hip-hop." It is a term steeped in elitism and I associate it with nauseating "let's take it back to '88" garbage by crap musicians who rap about rapping, which is a waste of time.) But every once in a while I get excited for a new record. Last year it was Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury, which was the best record of 2007, hands down. This year, it's Free at Last, the second long player by Philadelphia's Freeway, the most slept-on member of Jay-Z's Roc-a-Fella family. The man, an imposing behemoth of a dude with a gruff vocal delivery that is hungry and terrifyting, is not known the way he should be. And at no point do I think my little column here will change that. Accepting that, I'd like to give evidence toward his brilliance.
Freeway's 2003 debut, Philadelphia Freeway, features one of this decade's best songs, period. It's a Just Blaze produced collaboration with Jay-Z and Beanie Sigel (who made 2005's best rap record, by the way) titled "What We Do..." His collaborators deliver knockout performances, but I'll just focus on Free, on the way he rides Just Blaze's knocking drums and big-wheels-over-potholes bass... and the chimes and the keys and really the beat alone is out of control. Freeway's verse is saturated with gritty imagery, the kind of stuff that brings rap's thug glorification down to earth, breathes substance into it, and reveals the role of economic determinism. "When my heat stops working/then my heat starts working... if my kids hungry snatch your dishes out your kitchen... 'til I get my shit together/clean up my sins/Freeway got it." And the sampled refrain drops in: "even though what we do is wrong." Except no one got a thing wrong on this song.
