balogun's Full Review: Knowledge Is King by Kool Moe Dee
By 1989, Kool Moe Dee was at the zenith of his career. With two Billboard Hot 100 singles (“Go See the Doctor” and “Wild Wild West”) and a platinum album (How Ya Like Me Now), to his credit, he only continued to soar. LL Cool J, answering the thunderous jab of “How Ya Like Me Now,” replied with a largely self-congratulatory “Jack the Ripper,” only for KMD to clobber him again with “Let’s Go” and seemingly put him away for good. And then there were the side projects: his collaboration with KRS-One and other rap stars of the day in the single “Self Destruction,” and Quincy Jones tapping him for an appearance in his Back on the Block album, which resulted in him becoming the first rapper ever to perform at the Grammy awards and winning a Grammy for his assistance. Kool Moe Dee was on top, and in a sense, his third solo album -- Knowledge Is King, released in May of 1989 -- is symbolic of such an epoch.
Let’s start with the single: “They Want Money”. Absent from KMD’s second album, fellow Manhattanite Teddy Riley had returned just as he was rising as the founder of New Jack Swing -- producing tracks for Keith Sweat, Heavy D & the Boyz, Al B. Sure, and Bobby Brown, as well as putting together his own R&B group, Guy. The collaboration couldn’t have been better timed: “They Want Money” became Kool Moe Dee’s most successful single, with the marriage of a kinetic breakbeat, jumpy bass line, and a choral saxophone wrapped around Moe Dee’s indictment of gold diggers with gems like: “Drive my car? Don’t make me laugh/You better settle for an autograph!” and “I made the rhymes, I made the cash/Why get married and you take half!” A tad paranoid, yes, but it is his authoritative tone and his refusal to succumb to misogyny that helps immensely in making “They Want Money” perhaps the best such song in the rap canon.
And of course, I can’t forget to discuss “I Go to Work”. Generally speaking, this is arguably Kool Moe Dee’s best song, as well as one of the technical pinnacles of rap history. This is where his selling points are pushed to the limit: the internal rhyming; the impressive vocabulary; the mesmerizing robotic flow; the commanding baritone; and the song-title metaphor as he out-operates, outbuilds, and outboxes the competition -- all wrapped up in a soundscape of fluctuating and jetting horns, doubled hi-hats and bass stabs that sound like an alternative James Bond theme. Curiously, as if performing the concluding paragraph to a thesis statement, Kool Moe Dee wraps up the event by saying, “To say rap is not work is ludicrous/Whoever said it must be new to this/When you hear me, you’ll compare me/To a prophet for profit, not merely/Putting words together for recreation/Each rhyme’s a dissertation/You wanna know my occupation?/I get paid to rock the nation -- I go to work!”
That is rap for you: a skill, an art, a profession, something that can’t be dismissed as merely (ha!) “talking” over a borrowed loop. And with “I Go to Work”, Kool Moe Dee -- just like a few people before him, a few others in his time, and so many others since -- proved it to be so, despite the persistent horde of laughably deluded naysayers.
Although no other track in Knowledge Is King is at the level of the two gems mentioned so far, some come close. In fact, there is a nice mixture of uplifting songs and braggadocio. On one spectrum, you have the espousal of gaining knowledge (spiritual, academic, whatever) in the title track, the avoidance of street vices in “The Avenue”, the nod to black American empowerment in “Pump Your Fist”, and the description of KMD’s ideal type of girl in “All Night Long”, complete with his knack for alliteration (“Scintillating, sultry, stimulating, sexy/Super, subtle, smart, and seductive/Sensitive, serious, succulent, sensuous/Softly saying she loves this!”). And yes, the slow organ-burbling “Get the Picture” finds the protagonist boasting of his spellbinding powers at Mount Olympus: “Zeus would get loose, fully induced/I’ll make Apollo’s rhymes sound like Mother Goose/By night’s end, Mercury is so hyped/He’d spread the word that there’s a god on the mic!”
Then there’s the other spectrum: the battle tracks. Unlike the blasé quality of most of those type of cuts in I’m Kool Moe Dee and How Ya Like Me Now, the ones in Knowledge Is King -- a coincidental trio -- employ concepts to make them a little more interesting. In “I’m Hittin’ Hard”, Moe Dee likens his lyrical style to the punches of a boxer. In “The Don”, he is a crime boss (king of rap) leading his family (rap artists) to dominance in every facet of society (radio, sales, the charts). And in “I’m Blowin’ Up”, Moe Dee is the man with the explosives, as if more than willing to wipe out every last single trace of the corpse of a vanquished LL Cool J: “...come in a tank/And ten suits of armor/I won’t whip ya, I’ll bomb ya/When you’re on fire, it still ain’t enough/‘Cause I won’t just bury you, boy; I’ll blow ya up!” Head for under the desks, kids.
Once again, like in the two previous outings, Moe Dee is the chef in the kitchen, and he cooks a better-tasting stew than the first two trips. The improvements, though, are incremental rather than revolutionary (or even evolutionary). In addition to the aforementioned beatwork in “They Want Money” and “I Go to Work” , the trio of battle tracks are magnificently dressed in jumpy, funky grooves; and the alternation between James Brown samples and synthesizer work is still in place, the beats sporting fuller cheeks of bass and breakbeats. However, by this point, it is exceedingly clear that KMD is not or will never be a Marley Marl or a Bomb Squad member; and as a result, most of the music in Knowledge Is King sounds too much of its time. What might have rocked the house in eighty-nine might not illicit an acceptable measure of familiarity in oh-nine. Can anyone honestly say the same thing about, say, Run-DMC or the Beastie Boys?
So Knowledge Is King is not as timeless as most of the great records of the Golden Era. However, in Kool Moe Dee’s catalog, it is the least-aged of his albums, as well as providing the most consistent listen since the quality of the songs do not fluctuate as much as those found in the first two albums. A gold plaque was his award for his growth, away from the singles-oriented old school. Unfortunately for Kool Moe Dee, though, his good fortune was about to run out.
TRACK LISTING:
1. They Want Money 2. The Avenue 3. I Go to Work 4. All Night Long 5. Knowledge is King 6. I’m Hittin’ Hard 7. Get the Picture 8. I’m Blowin’ Up 9. The Don 10. Pump Your Fist
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.