Other than a nice Raekwon verse on the album-closing remix, everyone comes from Curren$y's own camp, including a great turn from his fellow No Limit veteran, the newly relaxed Fiend. But on the sequel, guys like that don't fit it's all about Curren$y drawing us into his own universe. The first Pilot Talk came with some big-name guests: Snoop Dogg, Mos Def, Devin the Dude. Curren$y finds artful, sidelong ways of approaching this stuff- punchlines that can read awkwardly on paper but sound amazing the way he delivers them. But his other lyrical touchstones are classic Southern rap material: girls, cars, money.
Spitta's favorite subject is weed, naturally enough, and both the music and his effortlessly calm delivery do great work at conjuring the sticky languor of a satisfying high. I've yet to hear any chillwave quite this chill.Īnd tracks like these turn out to be perfect for the slick shit that Curren$y talks so well. So instead of the classically thundering Southern rap of that song, we get a milieu that Curren$y himself describes beautifully on "Montreux": "It's that 1980 Marvin Gaye, live at the Montreux/ Stars in the audience, Al Jarreau in the third row." (That Curren$y considers Al Jarreau a star is the sort of thing that sets him apart from the rest of the rap universe circa 2010.) These aqueous beats come fleshed out with all sorts of beautifully rendered live instrumentation: horns and flutes and pianos and Fender Rhodes and slow-rolling stand-up bass and delicately winding acoustic guitars. Both of these Pilot Talk full-lengths work on vibe, and "4 Hours & 20 Minutes" would've interrupted the space-out. That rumbling, bass-heavy track doesn't appear on Pilot Talk II, and its omission is actually a good thing. My favorite Curren$y track from the past year is "4 Hours & 20 Minutes (Ride to H-Town)", a team-up with the blowhard Houston underground fixture Killa Kyleon that hit rap blogs shortly after the release of the first Pilot Talk. And on the sequel, Curren$y and Ski go even further with that central idea, pushing into sleepy, smooth funk territory that fits Curren$y's rap style perfectly. Teaming almost exclusively with veteran New York producer Ski Beatz, Curren$y rapped over a luxuriously dazed bed of lava-lamp instrumentals that pulled plenty of sounds from woozy psych-rock. And after he spent years with hometown powerhouses No Limit and Cash Money, and then on the mixtape circuit, Curren$y finally found his ideal place on the first Pilot Talk album, just a few months old now. Instead, his understated punchlines sneakily find ways into your brain and stay there. But he's not the type to smash us over the head with his strengths. Curren$y is a great pure rapper, a language addict with a tricky slip-sliding delivery and an ability to keep going for minutes at a time, uninterrupted by choruses. Near the end of Pilot Talk II, we get something resembling a mission statement from the sleepy-eyed young New Orleans rapper Curren$y: "Kill these beats humane fashion, painless." It's a perfect description of the man's rap style.
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