Music
An eclectic fusion album, Kamaal/The Abstract serves as a departure from Q-Tip's debut album Amplified (1999), which is more mainstream-oriented in its style and production approach. The album has Q-Tip rapping, singing, and exploring his jazz influences. While it contains elements of hip hop, pop, and rock music, the album's improvisational sound is generally rooted in jazz and funk. The album's songs mostly feature loose arrangements that provide space for improvisation. Its instrumentation is characterized by electric piano, flute playing, deep organs, guitar-fuelled grooves, and improvised solos. On its musical style, music critic John Bush wrote that Kamaal/The Abstract "pays homage to the last gasp of organically produced mainstream pop in the '70s and '80s, paying a large compliment to Prince and Stevie Wonder".
The album has been compared by writers to soul and funk-oriented albums such as D'Angelo's Voodoo (2000), André 3000's The Love Below (2003), and Prince's Musicology (2004), as well as the hip hop/neo soul work of the Soulquarians collective. In his book To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic (2007), music writer William Jelani Cobb cited Kamaal/The Abstract, along with The Roots's Phrenology (2002), Mos Def's Black on Both Sides (1999), Common's Electric Circus (2002), and the work of Jill Scott and Erykah Badu, as a "genre-bending" effort at musical expansion of hip hop.
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Famous quotes containing the word music:
“La la la, Oh music swims back to me
and I can feel the tune they played
the night they left me
in this private institution on a hill.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Nearly all the bands are mustered out of service; ours therefore is a novelty. We marched a few miles yesterday on a road where troops have not before marched. It was funny to see the children. I saw our boys running after the music in many a group of clean, bright-looking, excited little fellows.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man: wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)