Nightmares Of All The Things You Hate

DJ Quik & Kurupt “Hey Playa! (Moroccan Blues)”

I feel so dumb for having missed this until just recently, but it seems like the DJ Quik & Kurupt album took just about everyone who has heard it by surprise. BlaQKout is an absurdly pleasurable hip hop record; a tight set of songs that hover in a lovely middle ground between “Wow, they don’t make ’em like this anymore!” late ’90s/early ’00s nostalgia and “What the fuck are they doing?” ingenuity. “Hey Playa! (Moroccan Blues)”, the album’s dizzying centerpiece, drifts between solemn devotional chants and carefree summer jam bounciness, with the emcees deftly negotiating the chasm separating thoughtful intensity and glib hedonism in their verses. The track is a seamless blend of darkness and light, but the result is anything but gray — if anything, the things comes out sounding more like fluorescent day-glo without losing any sense of gravity. This is the work of men who have been working hard at their craft for years, and have reached the point where they can make this elegant music seem totally relaxed and easy. If you need a parallel to another album from 2009, you can think of this as hip hop’s answer to Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.

Buy it from Amazon.