Talib Kweli Just Wants Us to Listen on ‘Radio Silence’

Talib Kweli has never been ubiquitous. You’ve never seen him holding a Pepsi in a Super Bowl ad or buying a stake in a local sports team. Perennially under the radar — though to be fair, never all that far under the radar — Kweli gets by on respect. Rarely do you hear a bad word about him. As he said in his fantastic essay on white fragility from a couple years ago: “Rap beef is about rap. I’ve never had a rap beef in my life.” People may not be fans of his, people may disagree with his political stances, but nobody seems to be able to bring themselves to disrespect his skill at his craft. He is a deft rapper whose work is shockingly approachable for someone who never caters to the mainstream. He’s done his time in the business, he’s been good to and for the game, and it’s been good enough to him in return to offer a platform and a steady paycheck.

Radio Silence is the name of his latest album, and at face value, that title is a winking allusion to the rarity of hearing a Talib Kweli track on your local top-40 station. A few listens in, though, and another interpretation comes to bear: we can’t hear each other. Or, perhaps more to the point: we’re not listening.

There is not anger throughout Radio Silence so much as there is urgency, as though there’s something that Kweli needs to tell us but he’s running out of time, and there is no song that combines that urgency with the themes of speaking up and listening like the beautiful, difficult “She’s My Hero”. Kweli spends most of the song telling us the true story of Bresha Meadows, a 14-year-old girl in an abusive household who eventually felt she had no option other than to shoot her father to free her house from the terror of his anger. The way Kweli tells it, the gun was not her first choice: “But what about her brothers, she couldn’t leave her mother / They told the cops, but all that did was make him treat ’em rougher,” and then “Why bother when the system support her father / Gradually her thoughts got darker,” he raps. His kicker is an indictment of a society in which the poorest, the most in need are ignored and left for dead: “From video games to war as we solve our problems with violence / It’s how we speak / They either want your death or your silence.”

This is the world we are living in, this is the world that Talib Kweli wants us to change, a world in which we should start listening to someone like Bresha Meadows rather than ignoring her.

Kweli touches on these themes elsewhere, exhorting his audience both to speak up and to listen, either to him or each other. On “Traveling Light”, a song admittedly most memorable for its killer Anderson Paak hook and just-odd-enough-to-be-brilliant Kaytranada beat, he says “My rhymes inspired by environments of the very violent / I’m the voice of a generation that’s very silent,” criticizing those who would accept our present state. Amber Coffman’s hook on “Radio Silence” grounds a heady Kweli set of verses that conflate the physical and the metaphysical with a plea for understanding: “You were the one who wants to slow me down / I’m a criminal when you’re around / What makes me think you would love me? / What makes you want to attack me?,” she sings, while Kweli considers his place in a world that killed Martin Luther King and still believes in God. Datcha opens album closer “Write at Home” with a lengthy monologue stressing our insignificance in time and space, and how that should stress our similarities rather than our differences. The constant theme is one of longing, for a brighter future, for a better tomorrow.

Even “The One I Love”, whose silly and weirdly profane hook threatens to derail the entire album, carries with it a longing for more — to be more than just another guy, just another rapper. In a sense it’s leading by example, that Kweli isn’t just telling us what to do, he wants to be part of our movement toward something bigger and better.

If much of this seems a bit vague, that’s probably intentional. While Radio Silence is very much an album of its time, there’s a sense that its urgency and its drive could be appropriate for now or for ten years from now; other than the trial referenced in “She’s My Hero”, Kweli largely avoids specific references, particularly political ones liable to seem dated, say, three years from now. It’s clear enough where he’s coming from; he doesn’t need to spell it out so much as he needs to bring us in.

At this, he is moderately successful. His skill with a turn of phrase is still sharp, but the glaring issue with Radio Silence is that so much of it goes at one speed. There is an urgency to be found and not much else; some of the raps are faster than others, but Kweli himself stays at the same relative pitch throughout. He never relaxes, he never screams, he never tries to sing (which is likely for the best). He is a teacher, we are his pupils, and he is offering us his wisdom without resorting to any particular expression or vehicle for catharsis.

What we are left with is our own longing — we want to listen, we want to understand, but by the end, it always starts to sound the same. Talib Kweli has plenty of skill left, and his producers and guests are content to let him shine on his album rather than get swallowed up by the chaos around him. What he doesn’t have on Radio Silence is a clean narrative, a story for us to follow. What we get instead is variations on a theme. That’s not such a bad thing, granted. Pick up any one or two of these tracks (save maybe for those above “The One I Love”) and they’ll sound great — energetic, smart, everything you want Talib Kweli to be. The whole album at once is a bit numbing, but still worth listening to — Kweli’s voice, his cadence, his style is unique, and it’s absolutely worth hearing him go off. Even at the age of 42, he hasn’t lost what made him great at 26. He still has things to say.