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Shortly after I graduated from high school and only one year after 9/11, Talib Kweli made a decision to release a new album after his critically acclaimed Train of Thought. This time though, he wanted to expand production styles and explore some new topics. Especially things going on in the world after the disaster in New York and Washington D.C. He named in Quality (2002) and it’s name speaks for itself.

When I first picked up this album from Tower Records in Washington D.C., I was still carrying around a CD player. So when I walked out the store so excited to hear what this album had on it, I immediately unwrapped my present and popped it in. And the second I heard Get By, I looped the track over and over for over an hour. And then I popped it in the stereo system at my apartment so that all my friends could hear it. That song was the start of Kanye West’s sampling taking over the world. But no one really knew who he was when that song dropped.

Get By was only an introduction into a beautifully laid out album. In an interview conducted with PopMatters.com before the debut of Quality, Talib said that this time it “is less of a focus on ‘Hi, I’m Kweli, look at how dope I am. I can rhyme, let’s battle.’ And more about my growth as a human being and as a man.” I can definitely see that, both through his lyrical content and his expansion into different styles of music. The topics he discussed in The Proud really hit me, especially because it was the same time we committed to war and that hate was rising. And in Gun Music he took on another big topic, gun control, which had still been a very open table topic and never was addressed about honestly in a rap song. Even though Columbine was only a few years before this song and it affected everybody. Here are excerpts from both tracks respectively:

The president is a Bush and the vice president is a Dick
So a whole lot of fucking is what we’re gonna get.
They don’t wanna raise the babies so the election is fixed
That’s why we don’t be fuckin with politics
——————–
Silencers bring the heat without bringing the noise
Bringing the funk of dead bodies, go ahead bring in your boys
You’ll see the soul of black folk like W.E.B DuBois
Israelites got tanks and Palestinians got rocks

As many have said before me, this album really hit did well due to Talib’s experimentation with different production styles. You got to see much more of Talib’s skills and his ability to try out different styles of music + rhyming. Outside of Kanye West, Talib worked with Ayatollah, Dave West, Megahertz, Jay Dee, DJ Quick, The Soulquarians, Da Houd, and DJ Scratch. That’s alot of producers for one album while still trying to maintain a steady flow in between songs.

Even though much of my initial appreciation of this album was just because it was Talib and he was one of my favorite emcees (due to his work in Reflection Eternal and Blackstar), I grew past that. For me, its easy to get caught into the momentum and energy of an artist after the initial release. Sometimes the music is not even that good, but its just a fix that I was looking for since I think of music as my drug. So after my “high”, I still really like Quality and put it with the best of Talib Kweli’s work.