Only instead of savoring this narrative arc, why don't you just proceed to the three bonus tracks, which top an M.I.A. True, the main time they really make me go woo is when she breaks into gibberish at the end of "Work." But then some German hands her "Love on the Brain," the best new doowop song in decades, which segues perfectly to a power entreaty avec drunk violins, after which the album proper goes out on a piano-enhanced coda that adds a nice sweetness. So Anti is her best album for a reason so simple it's tautological-despite its supposed rejection of track-and-hook mechanics, it features catchier songs. The presentational Rihanna is so unlike anyone I know that she can say anything she wants about her musical punany as long as she leaves Chris Brown out of it-with this artist, sex is figurative, symbolic, the mark of a pleasure taker turned pleasure provider. Rihanna: Anti (Deluxe Edition) (Westbury Road/Roc Nation) 15: The reason I like this record beginning to end has zip to do with whether it documents her sexual mood swings more proudly or soulfully.Its statement of principle didn't get the victory it foresaw. But the music remains, urging us to love each other as much as we can as we achieve a happiness it's our duty to reaccess if we're to battle as all we can be. Hillary is a "woman with the wisdom who is leading the way," "The Donald"-Phife rhyming here, no later than March-all "Bloodclot you doing/Bullshit you spewing/As if the country ain't already ruined." The election didn't turn out like they figured. The album represents both their bond and the conscious black humanism they felt sure the nation was ready for: struggle yoked with work ethic, "forward movement" with "instinctual soul," "answer for cancer" with "learning is free," and damn right race-blind law enforcement. With everybody home and Busta Rhymes moved into the guest room, the drama is all in reuniting seeker Q-Tip, whose long apprenticeship as a fusion musician finally yields some beats, and family man Phife Dog, who left this mortal plane in March but rhymes all the way to the final track. Of course the hour that ensues isn't uniformly ideological-this is music, their first in decades and their last ever, and music's impulses and necessities are their heart. Track one moans "The heat the heat the heat the heat" to signify climate change not law enforcement before it states its cross-racial political purposes with a forthright "It's time to go left and not right." And fundamentally, that was the idea. Thank You 4 Your Service (Epic) 19: As it was envisioned, this through-conceived meld of rhythm and voice, harmony and hook, ideas and feelings, life and death would have dawned upon us 11/9 as a collegial reminder in the spirit of its title: OK ma'am, the wolf has skulked away from the door, now let the people shape their destiny. A Tribe Called Quest: We Got It From Here.
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