Available on: self-released mixtape

Big K.R.I.T. has been around for a few years now, but last year was really when he started making a big and heavily punctuated name for himself. A wizard behind the boards, and a pretty damn good rapper too, K.R.I.T. provided beats and guest verses on some of the best (and best produced) tunes of 2011: Alley Boy and Freddie Gibbs’s ‘Rob Me A Nigga’, Jackie Chain’s ‘Parked Outside’, T.I.’s ‘Flexin” and his own track, strip-club tribute ‘Money On The Floor’, which featured Southern luminaries 8-Ball, MJG and 2-Chainz. On top of this, K.R.I.T.’s own Return of 4Eva mixtape received widespread critical acclaim, and justifiably so – with highly accomplished, lavishly polished production, persistently intelligent rapping and absolutely no filler tracks, Return of 4Eva was one of those mixtapes which basically transcends, or steps outside of, the format. So it is with 4Eva and a Day, another free mixtape from K.R.I.T which sounds and feels like an album – and a very good album, at that, likely to be counted among the better albums of 2012 by the end of the year.

As K.R.I.T.’s star rises, the South rises again with it. Well, that’s not strictly true, of course. The South is actually a hugely dominant force in hip-hop in 2012, as it has been for many years now, its rap and production styles infecting both the mainstream and underground and inspiring homages and blatant rip-offs in all other regions of the U.S. But K.R.I.T.’s particular style of rap – which incorporates shades of the Blues (he is from Mississippi, after all), funk, soul and country music – is a continuation of a Southern hip-hop tradition, pioneered by legends like Outkast, UGK and Goodie Mobb, which has been rather eclipsed (at least in the popular consciousness) in recent years by the trunk shaking, flamboyantly aggressive rap of Jeezy, Weezy, Rozay and Gucci.

K.R.I.T.’s lush, mellifluous production mixes soul and jazz samples with live instrumentation, and is seldom aggressive (though never lacking in energy). It sets a relaxed and reflective tone, and its bluesy, sultry air instantly evokes a particular black southern (playalistic Cadillac) cultural and musical heritage, a heritage which K.R.I.T pays homage to throughout 4Eva…, either explicitly or implicitly. ‘Me and My Old School’, for example, is ostensibly a tribute to vintage-model Cadillacs, but as K.R.I.T. himself says, a vintage Cadillac isn’t, in this context, just a car. It’s “a time machine”; a link to the past that gives meaning to the present.

An affectionate and melancholy sense of nostalgia permeates 4Eva and A Day. ‘1986’ looks back to the year of K.R.I.T.’s birth (“I was popping my collar when I came out of the womb!”), which will probably be a surprising reminder to the listener that K.R.I.T., who seems venerable as the history he speaks for, weathered, weary and wise enough to be nicknamed Howling Old Blind Half-Mad K.R.I.T., is only 24 years old. K.R.I.T doesn’t only sound older than he is, with a deep voice and smooth timbre that sounds as exquisitely matured as the finest Tennessee whiskey. His lyrics are also extraordinarily mature, balancing an optimistic celebration of the finer things in life with a lucid, down-to-earth recognition of the oh-so-plentiful shittier things life has to offer.

The (loose) concept of 4Eva and a Day is that it takes in a day in K.R.I.T.’s life – we start (at ‘8.04am’, the title of the intro) with an alarm clock going off, and before K.R.I.T.’s feet have so much as grazed a pair of slippers, he’s already posing himself some seriously lofty questions: “Did I do all I can do, to be my best today?” ‘Wake Up’ follows, and he’s thanking God for being alive, musing about the passing of time (“A blink of an eye and life pass you by”) over a beautiful saxophone and strings track. He hasn’t even considered pushing the alarm back fifteen minutes by this point. It’s a strange way to start the day, and a stranger way to start a rap album: usually rappers begin their albums with the waking-up equivalent of snorting ten cups of coffee.

K.R.I.T isn’t your average rapper, though, and this is by no means your average mixtape. Instead of endless contempt for cash-deficient “player haters”, there’s sympathy and compassion for the poverty stricken on ‘Down and Out’ (on the crooning chorus of which K.R.I.T seems to channel Houston rap legend Z-Ro). K.R.I.T certainly – unapologetically – loves cars and women, but is able to simultaneously recognise the essential hollowness of the luxury life: “I’m still searching for antidotes / Niggas out here sick from the money they spent / Trying to get more cars and clothes and hoes”. Fast cars and faster women are fun, but are essentially “antidotes” to pain, just as weed and whiskey won’t solve a person’s problems, even if they do “stop the shakes”. Even falling in love doesn’t mean escaping life’s struggle, only complicating and deepening it – ‘Red Eye’ makes relationships seem life-affirming, but also worrying, more grist for anxiety and self-analysis: “I ain’t the man you want me to be / I guess that’s what’s been bothering me”.

All this wisdom might seem lofty and preachy if it wasn’t so obviously, pointedly, rooted in K.R.I.T.’s day-to-day life. ‘Package Store’, for example, finds K.R.I.T confronted by questions of morality and spirituality in the form of a drunken, philandering preacher he encounters outside the local store. In the second verse (outside the same store), K.R.I.T is robbed by a “hoodlum on the block” who puts a gun to his head before lecturing him on “the troubles of recession” (“And ain’t that many jobs out here hiring convicted felons”). ‘Package Store’ exemplifies K.RI.T.’s “Everyman” rapping – vividly rooted in a particular place and time, documenting a particular person’s everyday, but essentially concerned with stuff that effects everybody, everywhere, stuff that is ephemeral, but only as ephemeral as life itself.

When K.R.I.T pays tribute to his late grandmother on the touching ‘Yesterday’ (“I know it sounds cliché and they tell me just to pray – but I miss you like yesterday”), rap fans will feel doubly moved, both by the sentiment and the execution. The filtered horns, boom-bap beat and tender, earnest rapping recall Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s supreme masterpiece of rap eulogising ‘T.R.O.Y.’, and many will feel a semi-bereaved pang for a tradition of intelligent, emotionally engaged and soulful rap music which, though hardly entirely absent from modern hip-hop, still seems somewhat like a thing of the past.

4Eva and a Day, as an album (its hard to call it a mixtape), is another hip-hop throwback: a complete album, beautifully constructed, deserving of long-life in your media library. K.R.I.T.’s rapping is so intelligent, and his production so superbly composed and mixed, that it seems obvious that he isn’t merely paying second-hand homage to a tradition, but actively, and more-than competently continuing one (“Saw the future out my rear-view lens” he raps on ‘Me and My Old School’). At the very least, he’s continuing a one-man tradition of putting out excellent full-length releases and slowly but surely gathering a devoted fan-base, a testament to both his talent and perseverance. “The only difference between a winner and a loser is a winner plays until he wins” K.R.I.T raps on ‘Boobie Miles’. In the world of Big K.R.I.T, where hardship and suffering are ever-present threats to happiness, triumph is always hard won, but all the sweeter for it. And 4Eva and a Day is – modestly, but definitely – a triumph.

Jack Law