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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“This music crept by me upon the waters,
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Or it hath drawn me rather.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
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“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)