MCBackTalk with ‘Belong’ “creatively driven, and undeniably confident.”
The flow and wordplay presented on this track has a strong and consistent energy that showcases the artist as talented, with a genuine love for creating rhymes and making music. The way the voice connects with the underlying ambiance and the beat has a striking sense of realness as well as character to it. You can hear that evolution, the various changes in pace, the quicker moments proving to be no less skillful in expressing ideas – far more, in fact, if you consider the greater quantity of words. It always makes sense, and it’s always kept interesting. There’s even a shift to the melodic to mark that moment of freedom from structure, that break in the system, that hook to bring everyone together.
The music running alongside of the leading vocal performance has a unique and dreamlike aura to it that somehow contrasts yet fits well with the rhythm and bounce of the beat and indeed with the inherent individuality of the artist. The music does its thing, unfolding in a smooth and consistent manner, seeming to leave no space in that it fills every moment with some sample or sound or flicker of distant instrumentation. However, in spite of this apparent fullness, the rapper manages to utilise and even own the entire soundscape.
His lyricism makes sense in this setting, you follow those lines along like a crucial moment of story telling. Those changes in rhythm as mentioned help keep your attention throughout, as well as proving the creative behind it all to be both skilled, creatively driven, and undeniably confident. The confidence is a necessary element in hip-hop if you want people to listen, but verging over into pure volume and aggression is not always the best tactic. In this case, the balance is just right.
By Rebecca Cullen
Rebecca is a Musician and writer from Manchester, UK, with an MA in Song Writing
