Album Review: Music Saved Me 3 by KNOWITALL & Skip The Kid
The prolific Queens MC strips his series down to one producer and no guests, and the autobiography that pours out is specific, profane, and worth the hefty discography it took to get here.
Between the sixty-odd releases Skip The Kid has produced for other people and the twenty-plus projects filed under various KNOWITALL configurations, the two of them started calling themselves “your favorite emcee producer duo.” The Music Saved Me series is their recurring tag, the third installment of a partnership that has outlasted most independent rap catalogs entirely. KNOWITALL has kidney disease, has collaborated with Tragedy Khadafi and a rotating bench of underground Queens MCs (Patty Honcho, Backwood Sweetie, Blaq Chidori), and has been putting out albums since at least 2018 with no sign of slowing. Music Saved Me 2 spread the mic across seven guests. MSM3 cuts everyone else out. All Skip The Kid production, KNOWITALL rapping alone for the entire thing.
He goes back to Queens immediately. “Let’s Take ‘em Back” opens with his mother frying fish on a Friday night, “Wasn’t no Popeye’s when I seen my first biscuit,” and his father drinking, bar open at 8 AM. His uncles played cards at the table talking mob business. He and somebody named Sam robbed and scammed together, “SPIC and SPAM.” There were shootouts every day. “Vision Clearer” picks up the same thread from a different angle: being dressed poorly at school, watching kids on the short bus doped up on behavior medication, seeing people he used to smoke with get murdered. He cried his heart out into a tub of tears, he says, but that was years ago. On “Ignorant Livin’,” the detail is quarter water, old heads blowing mad piff, mixing it with “Brad Pitt,” and somebody shooting up the avenue over a woman. “Who would’ve thought of this as our future as we was kids on the block drinking quarter water?”
KNOWITALL’s father sipped Hennessy with tinted windows and a MAC-10 on “Another Lesson.” His uncle used to hit the Sherman (PCP) and say a sermon on “Skip 2 Step.” Bodies are stiff on “Ignorant Livin’,” clips hold a Jordan average, fiends hit glass. Silencers on “Vision Clearer” make it sound like you popped the top off a pop can. The MAC-10 is in the same sentence as the Hennessy and the tinted windows. The bodies are between the quarter water and the Brad Pitt. KNOWITALL mentions a murder and moves on to sneaker colors and Persian rugs.
God and the devil show up in a single verse on most of these songs, sometimes in a single bar. “Keep It Together” has KNOWITALL admitting the only time he prays, he sins. He hopes he and God get in tune before he’s in his casket and tomb on “Wish Me Luck.” God lives on Eastern Time, which is a funny thing to say and also a very specific kind of faith. God is local, God keeps business hours. But on “Skip 2 Step,” God told him his buffet is buffering, and time will inevitably give you what the Romans gave Christ, “whether it be cancer or a knife.” The devil comes alive in the heat of the moment (“Vision Clearer”). The reverend is in the most violent place (“Another Lesson”). He’s talking to both of them at once, two people at one table who hate each other.
The sports comparisons pile up without any self-consciousness. He’s Magic Johnson on “Going Down,” Jordan in the fourth quarter on “Another Lesson,” Joe DiMaggio on “Wish Me Luck,” Jerome Bettis running through people and too competitive for Bob Pettit on “Keep It Together,” Dikembe Mutombo at the start and Zion Williamson on the first track. Carnegie Hall is coming. He calls himself the last of the great prophets, original man, says his pen ink is pungent, his soul eternal fire burning in the firmament. There’s no irony in any of it. KNOWITALL says he’s the greatest with the matter-of-fact tone he uses to describe his father’s drinking. Whether the bars support the claim varies song to song. On “METAL HEART,” the Illmatic reference (“The World Is Yours, track four”) and the Malcolm X callback (“Get your hand out my pocket”) are placed inside a verse that actually moves with the aggression the comparisons promise. On “Time Again,” the truth-in-the-booth talk starts to blur with everything he said on “Going Down” and “Keep It Together,” the identical posture restated without new information.
The best writing on the album is on “METAL HEART.” KNOWITALL says a sixteen costs a thousand and would be modest, references Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light,” admits the writing is therapist-esque, and closes with:
“Heart made of metal
The dust don’t settle.”
It’s the one track where the references feel chosen instead of reflexive, where the verse has a shape beyond accumulation. “Wish Me Luck” is close behind, “Came from behind project buildin’, pen on the wall/Fleein’ from the law,” and the Carnegie Hall ambition read against the project stairwell is the album’s sharpest single image. “Ignorant Livin’” justifies its length through the quarter-water question alone, the whole song collapsing into that one line about childhood and its aftermath.
Some of the middle tracks, “Going Down” and “Time Again” especially, cover ground that other songs already own. The self-mythology on “Going Down” (“I’m like the Magic of the game”) is a version of the same claim made on “Another Lesson” and “Keep It Together” and “Skip 2 Step.” And Skip The Kid’s production keeps a steady floor beneath all of it, the consistency of his work cutting both ways—KNOWITALL always has room to rap, and the room always sounds the same. On “Wish Me Luck,” KNOWITALL says youngins commit crimes and record it, and God slammed the door on your finger, and every time he sings, it stings a little bit.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “METAL HEART,” “Ignorant Livin’,” “Wish Me Luck”