On June 9, DJ Quik and Kurupt's Blaqkout album will turn five years old. Since that time, DJ Quik has released one solo album, Book of David, and a scattered collection of solo songs. The latest, "Trapped On the Track," fits in the same unpredictable vein he tapped on Blakqout, of oddball, small-bore experimentalism. It also captures what makes Quik a mesmerizing artist, one who's diminished audience hasn't diminished his intellectual restlessness or curtailed his creative imagination.
In this instance, the friction between its disparate ingredients only make the song more engaging. As train sound effects ring out over a thunderously slow 808 boom, Quik slowly adds dissonant bells and sweet horn rips (a la "Fandango"). The rapper is joined by his son, David Blake, Jr., who shouts out the Migos, and Bishop Lamont, a longtime Aftermath collaborator who was rumored to have worked on Detox, a record that probably doesn't exist. The verses, much as Kurupt's on Blakqout, seem more interested in "stretching out linguistics" (to use Bishop Lamont's phrasing) than ideas—words that make shapes rather than crafting narratives. Quik is the exception; he can't help but say something.
This song isn't liable to become a hit in any real sense of the world. Quik's career arc started at its highest commercial point, and has been in popular decline since; creatively, though, he peaked a few years later, with 1997's Rhythmalism. That record is a masterpiece. Just as he was realizing his full potential as a musician and arranger, he was coming into his own as a speaker of truths. Rhythmalism was musically, conceptually versatile, a porous world so dense with ideas both personal and culturally relevant that it served as a totalizing artistic statement. His next few records tend to seem as if they were spun off the innovations of that one. This thread reached its conclusion with the appropriately-titledTrauma, which attempts to honestly reckon with the very real psychological traumas confronted by Quik—and by the transitive property of rap music, much of hip-hop America—in the 1980s and 1990s.
Sometime after that, Quik's creative ideas became more and more detached from the wider world. Not that he doesn't still use music as therapy; "Ghetto Rendezvous" from Book of David was a forceful story of familial betrayal. But it became ever more dependent on your investment in Quik as an artist. Whereas the Fixxers flipped snap music's tricks to again give him some contemporary relevance without sacrificing Quik's inherent Quik-ness, more and more since that time, his work has felt as if it were on its own planet, loosed completely from the gravitational pull of hip-hop's fragmented center.
Quik is the rare artist who, loosed from the reins of a capricious popular audience, still creates work worthy of attention. His music has become more eccentric, his touchpoints oblivious to trends. But he does it without losing his lighthearted nature. Poised in a perfect balance, it has an irreverent, for-the-hell-of-it experimental vibe. He seems more interested in how fun an idea is, rather than how "groundbreaking"—or whichever other pretentious aim one might ascribe to their own music in order to earn some purchase in the marketplace.
Even though its experimental, it still plays by certain rules: while his bars have a high signal-to-noise ratio, since Blakqout he's been more drawn to rhyme-for-the-sake-of-riddling rap styles from his collaborators. Density rules the day. Likewise, while each track might pull the rug out from the one previous, incorporating whatever novel gimmick he needs, it's never done for the mercenary purposes of popularity, like a Jermaine Dupri. Instead, he's following some unknowable internal compass. He's "Trapped On the Track" because nothing else really has a hold on him.
DJ Quik and Kurupt "The Demon's Carol" (2012)
DJ Quik "Life Jacket" (2013)
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