Review Summary: A marker for hip-hop, and an invite to the party.
Okay, so there’s this moment right, about halfway though The Knux’s
Fuck You EP where Rah Almillio manages, somehow, to drop the line:
“If you hate life, you love life, that line is thinner than shoestring/ Breathe, it’s better than poontang and Wu-Tang” (Fruits)
Just give that a second. If the moral philosophizing didn’t get you, there’s something about that double Tang that almost certainly would. And together with the beats? Well, that’s a whole new dimension right there. But The Knux have a tendency to do that. And hell, there’s even a wager to be made: if you wanted to know where the state of hip hop stands at the turn of the new decade, F
uck You is just about the most perfect place to look. Everything, and I mean everything, is just there – look, the sex, the beats, the (ahem) depth, the humor, the pop culture references – out in the open. And don’t get me wrong, not all of what’s thrown down sticks, but who said this particular zeitgeist was the best one on offer anyway? What matters is that The Knux, Almillio and Krispy Kream (yeah really), have distilled it all into a five track EP that takes its cues equally from the genre warping of OutKast and the smoothness of Q-Tip, all the way to the quirk of Spank Rock and the beats of the Antipop Consortium.
And like the ragged collection of inspiration,
Fuck You stumbles its way across a surprisingly large terrain of sound, from the fun filled 80s groove of “Floozy” to the simmering electrosynth lines of “Pop the Cork”. Stumbles, not because The Knux don’t always pull it off, but simply in that their eagerness to display diversity, the duo sometimes step over the mark and lose a sense of consistency that would make F
uck You a far smoother listen, especially on a tracklisting that jumps from the slow introspection of “Fruits” to the hard hitting cover of Jason Derulo’s “Watchu Say” in a single fell swoop. Still, what keeps this hanging is the sheer conviction by which Almillio and Kreme punch their way through this EP, bringing with them a self assuredness not seen since the rap of the 90s – hence, F
uck You. And there’s the magic: F
uck You isn’t wrapped in anger or resentment, or even some misplaced sense of superiority – in the hands of The Knux, “F
uck You” becomes a casual diss, cool as hell, and obnoxiously uncaring to its core.
At only five songs long, F
uck You plays like an entrée platter to bigger and better things to come than a hearty meal unto itself. While it isn’t the perfect EP by any means, what it does do is serve as a marker, both musically for The Knux themselves, and for their contemporaries as a whole – where does rap go once you’ve been everywhere? Yet for all its disparate elements, The Knux have done something really pretty cool: turned something titled as aggressively as F
uck You into an invitation to party.
3.3/5
