Black Milk: "Deadly Medley (f/ Royce Da 5'9" and Elzhi)"

One of about a dozen voracious, head-on sonic attacks on Black Milk’s new record (Kanye’s gonna have to shake these live-in-the-red monster drums out of his brain with his head tilted to the side and a palm hammering at the top ear), “Deadly Medley” benefits from two things that the rest of the record does not have: one, a simple but ravishing refinement, a dirty break driving a beat that chortles out knowingly from within the clear discord between its two parts, two sides of one asymmetrical heart; two, Royce and Elzhi.

And while Black Milk doesn’t make any huge strides as a rapper over the course of Album of the Year, there’s the sense on this song, with this beat, with this company, that his confidence and audacity and sheer hunger for all things hard can carry him far beyond his own limitations. Looking forward to what his peers are about to drop on the track, Milk drops one of his best verses of the record. It’s all grandstanding, all bigger-than-life, all chilling-on-some-skyscraper shit. Check the video (ignore the part where Milk runs into a paparazzi of four). His verse means nothing except that its meaning is all in its posture. And its posture is upright, pants anchored to the cement by hardware while fingers point to the heavens. Which is what anyone would do with this beat in their head. Which is why when I listen to this track I suddenly find myself agreeing with Milk when he states that he’s “Martin Luther” while his lessers are “Martin Lawrence.” I shit you not, I want to go stand on the edge of a tall building.

Royce sounds kind of overwhelmed by the beat’s nasty immensity, admirably degenerating into the pseudo-Weezy rhetoric of making an emphatic non-rhyme punchline out of “I don’t even write seriously, I just fuck around,” but he’s the only dude who completely switches up his flow for the beat’s perverse flip—and it’s a wildly successful moment. Elzhi, on the other hand, is completely game to be a Malice stand-in and more, hitting a gallop of a lyrical stride once he gets to “Pockets go green like it was Earth Day / That’s why I blow cake / like it’s my birthday.” On “Deadly Medley” the beat is bigger than the rappers and that’s a good thing. Their bars get to exist, almost by default, on a higher plane.