KRS-One & Buckshot, Survival Skills
The teacher returns for a lesson in lyricism
"I only speak when I have to speak," raps KRS-One on Survival Skills. If only it were so! For a certain school of backlash, this New York team-up with Boot Camp Clik's Buckshot might be the un-self-censoring rapper's first album worth his baggage since Boogie Down Productions' classic 1987 debut, Criminal Minded. Paired with perpetually laid-back underground lifer Buckshot amid beats by Havoc, 9th Wonder and Black Milk (with guests including Mary J. Blige, K'NAAN, and Slug of Atmosphere), KRS-One's emphatic anxiousness never sounded more focused or welcome: His juicy enunciation is a hip-hop pleasure as evergreen as the 9/11 paranoia he sometimes lapses into at the podium.
The way KRS shapes it, "Robot" is more than a Roger Troutman-upping lampoon of Auto-Tune overuse: The song takes robo-music as a metaphor for robo-thinking. "We Made It" redefines "making it" as every personal breakthrough of growing up, while "Think of All the Things" finds the Teacher preaching at his most zestfully to young women: "You keep seeking little boys who only want sex from you/Real men want the rest of you." Nothing you haven't heard maybe, but the rapper's urgency springs eternal: In his mid-40s, he truly sounds "hungry like I never had a meal."
