I'm covering the "Seventh Seal," album by Rahkim. I'm doing this also because I feel very passionate about music like that, and I hate to see it undermined. I know Rah doesn't need me to support him or build him up, but he deserves it as a cornerstone of hip-hop and modern art. His lyricism is timeless, and when you listen to his early stuff, or this album, you can see why Nas looks up to him. But hip hop culture as a whole, as well as society today doesn't see it that way. He is another overlooked artist who doesn't fit the mold of idiocy that people accept, and is thus considered trash.
I'm going to cite an excerpt from a review for the album, which recieved about 3 stars by the way:
The album sold 12,000 copies in the United States by November 22, 2009, according to SoundScan.[13] Upon its release, The Seventh Seal received generally mixed or average reviews from most music critics, based on an aggregate score of 59/100 from.
That's from wikipedia. If you look up the critic reviews, you'll see that the album received an average score of about 4/10. This is for an album that was delayed and poured over for several years. Rahkim took this project very serious, and even parted with Dr. Dre to maintain its integrity, and all of that is lost on an empty minded public. I'm honored to have this album on my mp3 player. If you actually listen to the lyrics, you will not only be blown away by the depth and delivery, but you will instantly know that you have something on your hands that will keep giving for years to come. I personally built my career on that thinking. Everything that I made as an artist and put out, I wanted to be timeless and to build up the listener far into the future. Artists like him inspired that. Critics have the nerve to sum Rahkim in words like these: Rakim's subject matter often covered his own rapping skills and lyrical superiority over other rappers.[44][45] Allmusic editor Steve Huey comments that "the majority of his lyrics concern his own skills and his Islamic faith."[7]
It disgusts me that his depth has gone completely over the heads of these so- called listeners. I'll leave you with this quote and you tell me if even when he does rhyme about himself, which he does not always do, is it a problem:
"Things run up in it mass where I been, nothing get em high as a bag of Rakim
I'm red like Canadian, cuss with a Opium touch a fat piece of hash, seen soap with some dust
I got it so good, I got the whole hood smoking it, coke cookers kill for the flow to cook coke in it
The new form of crack, turn fans to fanatics hip hop hands to attacks fiends hit off that
DJ's cut it, let the streets step on that, still a hundred percent pure King Heron's back"
Very underrated album! This is easily a classic
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