As he takes a fuller view of his life and the fates of his idols, he grows more cautious. Gibbs has been talking black power in various forms since his early mixtapes, but here he’s less certain about what it looks like, who embodies it, how to secure it. Across the record Gibbs mentions various black figures and tragedies, from the transatlantic slave trade (“ Flat Tummy Tea”) to Baltimore drug kingpin Melvin Williams (“Education”) to basketball star Allen Iverson (“Practice”) to the death by police bombing of mass shooter Micah Johnson (“Soul Right”) to Tupac’s assault on the Hughes Brothers (“Massage Seats”), weaving a grand, ambiguous tapestry. Bandana is palpably more unhinged, less rooted in a particular time or style or mood. The general vibe was defiant, gritty, and nostalgic, fitting the back-to-basics spirit of a proud lyricist linking with an inveterate crate-digger. Smoky soul drifted out of every crevice, drugs flooded the streets, and middle fingers never came down. On Piñata, the duo bridged Gibbs’ street sense and Madlib’s throwback flair by embracing the sounds and attitudes of blaxploitation. Moving in lockstep, Gibbs and Madlib pull themselves deeper into one another’s worlds, forging a new one in the process. The result is a keener sense of each other’s presence. This time, though, they made the effort to meet in the studio and review different mixes and edits, to calibrate. Their overall recording process didn’t change much: Madlib sent beats and Gibbs rapped over them as is-samples, pauses, breaks, and all. Madlib’s beats remain off-kilter, and Gibbs remains gangster, but there’s a looser feel to this record, a spirit of intuition and intimacy.
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