Last Summer I caught up with Rob Roy, and we chopped it up over the telephone. He gave me a rundown of how he got to where he was at, and I wrote this piece. I hope you enjoy it.

Making good hip hop is about walking a fine line between who you are and who you aspire to be, and doing it in a way that makes other people want to walk it too. Everyone goes through the trials and tribulations of being a human, but not everyone meets their challenges with the same outlook. On a whole, hip hop is about meeting the struggles of life with the intention of conquering them, and rappers like Rob Roy empower people. Unlike other rappers though Rob just does Rob, and doesn’t make a lot of the common concessions to make the audience feel comfortable, but he does an incredible job of making the audience feel welcome. His forthcoming record King, Warrior, Magician, Lover is an aptly titled roundup of the human archetypes that contributed to the music’s creation.

This is not a record that got made because of a recording budget. This is not a record that got made because Rob is great at notating sheet music. This is not a record that got made because Rob plays an instrument so well. This record has more in common with Afrika Bambaataa rocking a Mohawk, Kool Herc flipping the merry go round, and Grandmaster Flash building his own mixer––because what they had was what was in front of them—than it does anything else. This record wreaks of the finest strains of what the G-ds laid down, cured in the purest cellars of funky Southern do-goodery, and released for our pleasure.

If you’ve heard the single/seen the video for “Fur in my Cap” then you know the deal. If not, then you need only know that in 3’56” Rob manages to make you both embrace and shun everything you love and hate about hip hop (and you can check the video below for confirmation). But, there’s a lot more to what he’s doing than the crunked out synth strings of the track might suggest.

While you may be inclined to question what it is that Rob is doing, there is no question that he is a rapper from the South. As Rob told me, “It’s about the path that Outkast paved, as much as it is about their music. They opened up doors, and broke down barriers and a multitude of styles, and scenes emerged after them.” Rob takes note in a brilliant way, and steps through those doors with a particular panache. He delivers something that is familiar, yet unexpected. His music is what hip hop might sound like on the other side of whatever comes next. And taking keen inspiration from what is arguably the greatest hip hop duo ever, Rob manages to imply a kind of chic credit where it is due. Rob definitely owns a particular brand of Southern rap, with the delivery a bit more nasal, vowels drawn out fluidly as if they were being pronounced by the slow-motion tongue of a chameleon, and the syllables lilting along in rapid succession. But moreso, the entire aesthetic of the album is drenched in the twang and sensibilities that the South as a musical region rears.

This music is evidence of a life lived—it’s the existential reverb of great things. And all of this is really important to recognize when you listen to Rob’s music. In the 1970s before anyone realized that what they were doing was hip hop, people made hip hop because they had energy and they needed something to do with it. Forgive me if you think I’ve drunk too much of the Kool-Aid, but hip hop is spiritual music. It is the musical embodiment of the spiritual battleground. We are metaphysical people, we do things we can’t explain, and we feel things we can’t understand, but making music takes all that ineffable ether and transforms it into something tangible that can be shared. Hip hop is a lot like alchemy in that sense, except that while alchemy sought a better world through chasing the unknown, hip hop seeks to reorganize the known world in a way that better suits us. And that is the struggle that has always been part of hip hop, and always will be: life is out there, but not how we want it to be. The struggle doesn’t have to be drugs, or jail (but it often is, perhaps because that type of struggle has a certain immediacy). The struggle and its translation is what makes great hip hop. That struggle can be anything from the difficulty of providing for a family without having a decent-paying job, to not knowing who you are, to the mind-melting gut-rending gruel of love, to wanting to be a baller, ad infinitum. For Rob it’s about growing up into life, and figuring it all out.

The magic of hip hop is that it allows an individual to open their personal struggle to an audience as not only something to empathize with, but also something to participate in. And Rob’s music definitely invites us to participate. It is the perfect blend of playful and indiscernible, you know you can get into it but you’re not sure where it’ll take you. Songs such as “Duval” “White Shoes” and “Fur in my Cap” will make you move, but surveying the terrain is pointless because it’s shrouded in a glowing fog. The glowing fog is Rob Roy, leading you along, and keeping you on track, but never revealing where you are or what’s happening; it’s all very inviting and amiable abstraction (which is a nearly impossible balance to strike if you’re at all familiar with the cold uninviting history of experimental music in Europe and the US). Rob’s music has a weight, but not one that is flaunted, instead Rob leaves it hidden for you to discover.

Knowing how to distill the relevant universal elements from a very personal struggle with life is the stroke of artistic genius. Maybe I’m going out on a hyperbolic limb here, but I’d say artistic genius is the strongest element of KWML. This is not the kind of record that you can pin down easily. I’ve been bumping it regularly for over a month, and I’ve yet to really figure out how it breaks down, and when it does what is there. All I know is that Rob was obviously, truly living his life when he made this music, and that is rare for a rapper. Further, he did an amazing job of taking what it was that he was living and turning it into music with no shortage of vitality. Like I mentioned earlier a rapper walks a fine line between the life he or she lives, and the life that he or she would like to live. Rob has his feet firmly planted in reality, and whatever it is that he aspires to is a mystery for the audience, but whatever it is, we hear it, and it’s compelling and it’s close.

- Zachg