Blu & Exile finally offer a worthy spiritual successor to their
seismic 2007 debut with a sprawling double album about the cultural forces
that shape us.
Despite some initial drama—a botched release, a shuttered label—Blu &
Exile’s 2007 album Below the Heavens quickly became a cult classic. Years
later, it was hailed as a “magic album” and a tectonic shift that changed
West Coast rap. The Los Angeles backpack rapper and Dirty Science producer
have each had their own successes since, but they’ve never quite been able
to escape the shadow of their massive collaborative achievement. The
follow-up, Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them, was delayed
five years, its name hinted at looming fatigue, and it sought to replicate
the BtH palette outright. In the eight years that followed they continued
to work together, producing shelved trap and electronic albums, but they
were never able to “answer the call,” as Blu put it. That is, until Miles:
From An Interlude Called Life, the worthy successor to their seismic
debut.
Named, in part, for jazz titan Miles Davis (and dedicated to Miles Elijah
Barnes), the album is about closing loops (musical, personal, historical),
the pair’s long, exhaustive journeys through the underground, and tracking
their roots in the process. “It felt like we had been miles away from
where we started, and it felt like we had a lot to say about all those
miles that we’ve traveled since we’ve begun,” Blu told Bandcamp. In many
ways, Miles is like a bookend, not just measuring the distance traveled
since Below the Heavens but also finding some semblance of closure. As a
rhymer, Blu uncovers the contexts associated with words and finds where
different shades of meaning overlap, especially with his name, and here he
goes to the next level. He is optimistic amid adversity and adept at
managing complex ideas, summed up by this lyric from the opener: “I don’t
see the glass half full, I see the whole pitcher.”
Miles: From An Interlude Called Life finds a great rap bluesman, laborer,
and journeyman thinking about what produced him and the nature of
connection. In an interview with the Grammy website, Blu shared that Davis
was his grandfather’s favorite artist, that despite always being around
the songs, those vibrations didn’t reach him until he was in his 20s, and
that getting into jazz through Davis opened his eyes. On “All the Blues,”
he raps about naming his son Miles in tribute. The album features Blu’s
childhood friend turned R&B star Miguel and Exile’s longtime partner
Aloe Blacc, who introduced Ex and Blu in ‘03. In a clever bit of
stitching, “Miles Away,” a song about going from city to city on the road,
samples the Mos Def verse from “Travellin’ Man.” Many of the early verses
are autobiographical, raw, and full of detail as he charts his path to rap
through the people and places that molded him, and he shows how BtH helped
open a gateway for rappers like Kendrick Lamar and Earl Sweatshirt. He has
never been more approachable than he is on “The Feeling” and “You Ain’t
Never Been Blue,” songs that navigate the emotional and financial woes of
a working-class rapper.
The second half of the double album digs deeper into ancestry and shared
history. It is a bit like Terrence Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life in
its pursuit of an existential throughline; both weigh the experiences of
the person against the larger forces that shape identity, exploring the
relationship between the singular and the collective. Blu’s raps about
growth and struggle lace into accounts dating back to antiquity—of soul
music, freedom fighting, and self-discovery. Each of these threads is
carried by Exile’s stunning, rich sample work, patching together themes
about being Black and blue, searching, and learning from your pilgrimage.
Miles doesn’t stray too far from the formula of their first two albums,
but they feel more like diarists than classicists.
The nine-minute epic “Roots of Blue” is a generational survey of the
Black civilizations that sprung forth from the cradle of life and how
their descendants came to occupy America. The verses are dense yet rapped
gracefully as Blu traces the diaspora back to the source; each verse
unpacks a royal, spiritual, political, or musical Black legacy. He doesn’t
just sound like he’s rattling off names or reciting facts; it’s as if he’s
connecting dots. “African Dream” and “The American Dream” are like halves
of a whole—the motherland fantasy against a capitalist fairy tale. Both
are feats of imagination.
Miles is the rare 20-track, 95-minute album that mostly justifies its
length. The scope is broad, and Blu weaves with skill between macro and
micro. Some of his attempts to zoom out don’t cohere. On “To the Fall, But
Not Forgotten,” an homage to the lost becomes a random roll call for
celebrities as disparate as Kimbo Slice and Paul Walker. “Dear Lord” is
like a COEXIST bumper sticker in song form. And on “The End,” he compares
his album’s grand finale to famous assassinations, the 9/11 attacks, and
the extinction of the dinosaurs.
But Blu is usually deft at pinpointing himself inside the larger
narrative. The nostalgic “Music is My Everything” unfurls his own personal
history of hip-hop—his cousin teaches him about basslines, his aunt dates
Eazy-E, and his mother’s new reverend husband bans secular music from the
house. His flows are fluid, his thoughts lucid, recalling memories as his
route to rap runs parallel with the boom of the California scene. As with
most of Miles, the firsthand experiences of its creators are presented as
tiny pieces in a much grander mosaic, one spanning generations.
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