While Blu hasn’t been quite as bad post-Below the Heavens as many might like to gleefully claim, it’s essentially a given that Blu doesn’t seem like he’s on the verge of dropping a working-class hip-hop classic on the level of his first brilliant work.  On Below the Heavens, Blu conducted a master class on capturing sorrow and spinning it into optimism, on grasping the most abstract of emotions and painting it with his words.  Since then, the majority of his career has been inexplicable.  Recording entire albums through what sounds like a cat litter box, drunkenly stumbling off stages mid-set after forgetting entire songs, discarding the sound that made him one of hip-hop’s brightest stars in favor of darting electronic instrumentals.  Not that it’s all been bad – his followup to Below the Heavens with Exile, Give Me My Flowers While I Can Smell Them, was brilliant – but Blu’s become a sad story of wasted talent.

But occasionally he’ll drop something like this.  The Knxledge-produced “DraginBreff” lives on Sweeney Kovar‘s Classic Drug References Vol. 1 compilation, wedged between Ras_G and Mike Chav.  While Knx lets a melancholic trumpet murmur its notes above piano riffs on the type of jazzy beat that Blu’s flashed his greatness on before (L'Orange’s “Alone”), the real show comes from the best lines Blu’s rapped in years.  I could go on how “technically brilliant” the Los Angeles rapper is, how he’ll accelerate and brake his delivery to reflect his words, how he’ll stagger rhymes and suspend words.  But that’s not why this song is so good.  Blu’s got a remarkable knack for framing universal emotions in small vignettes (“When I was six, I thought that I would be the president/Now I’m twenty-seven, staring at perception and present tense”), drawling out indelible quips (“Never tell never to a kid with a pigment problem”) and posing wry philosophical queries (“How can a rapper be demoted to preacher?”).  It’s been all too long since Blu has scrawled his lyrical paintings across a laid-back, jazzy soundscape as deftly (and audibly) as he does here. Maybe we’ll never get another classic from Blu.  But I guess I’d settle for more of these ninety-second illustrations.