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Ski Beatz - “Cream Of The Planet (Instrumental)” off 24 Hour Karate School

If you want to know why Curren$y is a very good, maybe even vital rapper, check out Ski Beatz’s 24 Hour Karate School, wherein rappers of pretty much every style rhyme over Ski’s absolutely fucking immaculate production and all fail pretty miserably. All the other wandering weedhead rappers can’t figure out what to do with stuff this elaborate and neither can your super-serious rappers like Jean Grae or Ras Kass. Shit, Camp Lo even come off pretty bad. That’s why I’m focusing on this bonus track instrumental, “Cream Of The Planet,” which at one point or another, featured Mos Def, but doesn’t anymore, which is a good thing.

“Cream Of The Planet” isn’t a skillful soul beat, it’s a time-traveling, rap-tinged, jazz-funk composition. Note the way the song defiantly arrives—that confident row of horns, the waves of organ—and how it spreads out from there, before turning in on itself in the final moments, each instrument exiting, before a polite, extended fade-out. The only comparable song is Dilla’s cover of “Think Twice.” A quick look at the credits for 24 Hour Karate School show that the only non-instrument here is Ski’s drums—the rest of this is played by a room full of real, live musicians. Now, that isn’t impressive on some musical purity level but because it’s completely unnecessary. That’s to say, this could be another cool blaxploitation-soaked beat from the producer of Uptown Saturday Night and be just fine, but instead it rolls along, slightly shifting, like the interstitial music in a blaxploitation flick (a good, sophisticated one too, more Across 110th Street than say um, Black Samson).