There are a lot of cats out there doing old-school hip hop and making it as real and sticky as the summer heat, but very few who use the enduring legacy of the genre's second golden age to actually talk about the era the sounds were rooted in. Dudes who were there obviously still have a certain nostalgia for the sonics and styles of the '90s and early '00s, and you'll hardly hear a track from Masta Ace where he isn't dropping bars about how it used to be, however, it's still comparatively rare for a rapper to combine aesthetics with reflections the with the same degree of potency as One Be Lo does on his 2020 album Baby (Being a black youth). Produced by Eric G, Baby sees the Detriot-born MC hustle and pivot around jets of splashy soul sampling and beautifully choreographed bass grooves while pounding out rhymes atop beats as sturdy as reinforced concrete. Sounds that filled his home as a young man extend along generational touchstones like a periscope of perennial sonic resurgence and insurgence, in which parents' funk records become the trenches from which future rap battles are waged and won for cash and immortality. As the cut and weave of the beats intertwine with his verbose and statically charged flow it energizes the recollections and remixes of his life in ways that are both enlightening and highly visceral, as he innumerates and illustrates the facts of growing up a young black man in the long grasping shadow of the disintegrating American dream. The record is a banger, full stop. But beyond its sheer sonic excellence, Baby is a missive of encouragement forwarded with the speed and force of cannon fire from another lifetime- dispatching an absorbing message of independence and perseverance as a living report on the will to fully seize on the threads of one's own potential and pursue one's dreams as if one were bulletproof. Living, especially living long enough to reminisce about living, isn't easy. But things that are worth doing seldom are.
