"Stigmata" - Ab-Soul

If there's one thing Black Hippy does right every time, it's image. Their videos are always Hollywood caliber, momentously slick productions, and this puppy is no exception. That's a business lesson unto itself: there are no exceptions. This is a big part of why their formula works. Consistency.

Ab-Soul is beyond critique. That's not a compliment, really, just a factual observation: the man is a legitimately unhinged force of nature, the product of more life experience prior to age 21 than most Americans see in a lifetime of wage slavery. He operates with an endearingly flagrant disregard for any of the technical standards or cultural conventions that rappers take for granted in 2014. So maybe it is a compliment after all: my opinion about Ab-Soul's ascension is every bit as irrelevant as yours. It's already a foregone conclusion.