Go Home With You

Kardinal Offishall (ft. T-Pain) "Go Home With You"


Kardinal Offishall "Going In"

I guess people are too busy either sucking Kanye's d-i or raping him up the ass to notice that Kardinal Offishall just dropped the best mainstream album of the year.

It was really tempting for me to write this off as his sell-out album. Kardi already half-admits it in the album's title, Not 4 Sale, as if pre-emptively guarding against critics because Kardi knows himself that this is some sell-out shit. Glancing at the guest spots, it looked to me like hip-hop had died and went to a hell where it must spend the rest of eternity collaborating with R&B devil crooners. But I give Kardinal more credit than that, and even moreso, I give Steve Rifkind more credit than that, given his history of managing gully-ass rap on his labels (hell, he even signed Pharoahe--Rifkind knows good rap).

Behind the sparkling synthesizers and unnecessary, forced star-powered guest spots that characterize most mainstream albums, Kardinal still spits that illness. This isn't his sell-out album but it is his compromise album. It's the compromise that conscious artists like Lupe Fiasco have been trying to achieve for the good portion of this decade. The compromise that lets them preach to the people beyond the choir. Kardinal looks to have achieved it here, feeding his lyrical gymnastics and refreshing positivity with a spoonful of glossy synths and sing-songy gayness to help it go down the throats of the radio-tuning masses. It's not just sneaky. With Kardinal's always-dynamic delivery able to adapt to the production, it's legitimately good and entertaining. And in the second half of the album where Kardi looks to have been given more creative control, he starts keeping it real again and drops gems like "Ask me who's my top 10?/ I'ma mention myself, my shadow, my fame and no more men".

The album can be summed up in the song "Go Home With You". It's a song that's sorta about the club with a T-Pain guest spot that seems tailor-made for the club and for radio. The beat lurks in the shadows and then T-Pain's vocoder crooning comes in, embellished by this ghostly choir on the hook, creating this haunting, hypnotic club atmosphere. But Kardi merely uses the typical club theme as a jumping off point for impressive wordplay-based braggadocio and even for some conscious raps. It's the type of effortless balancing act that characterizes the album, a balance between the brand of lyrical hip-hop he came up with and loves and the brand of club-ready hip-hop that will expand the messages he spits beyond the underground niche audience.

Now stop blogging about Kanye's latest exploits in attention-grabbing and cop that Kardinal Offishall.