By Odeisel
If you’ve been riding with us on Planet Ill, you know how much we dug Bilal’s latest album, Air Tight’s Revenge. The work presented an impassioned, ambitious talent in his full glory returning to the big stage. While critically acclaimed, it flew under the radar when it came to recognition but real listeners know. The movement isn’t over and Bilal has remixed his song “Robots,” courtesy of Remy LBO, with rapper Blu riding shotgun.
The new construction takes an entirely different direction with low, chunky basslines and moody strings that carouse with well-timed and Scooby Doo mysterious organs grinding along the path of the rhythm. There are long, expansive parts where Bilal ad libs along a winding, melancholic string section atop a ba-boom…clap drum pattern. At different points the production allows for different motion; cradling Blu’s rhyme, battling Bilal’s mania, and bringing the listen in for a caramel smooth landing.
Blue opens with a series of questions that strike to the heart of show business. How low are artists willing to go just to be seen? How far are they willing to go for their dreams? Blu delivers his lines with a disconnected coolness as if these questions don’t affect him as an artist. He waxes:
Do we ever stop being monkeys, do we stop making money, even not be hungry, will it ever seem funny when a rapper takes the stage and draws? Band plays a laptop, strippers think the dollars will fall, will they never see it never was ours until we wanted it?
Bilal sings of the search for the almighty dollar and how easy it is for people to fall in line and behave like that which they used to complain about just to get a taste. He speaks of signs that the end is near with his haunting, haughty Dracula-like delivery, contrasted with the high note of his ad libs.
It’s not hard to separate the fake from the real. With artists like Blu and Bilal you know your’e going to get originality. Nothing at all like the “Robots.”
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