ab soul control system album download zip

His breakout, Control System, remains among the best Top Dawg releases, boasting one of the most heart-wrenching and personal rap songs of the past several years (“The Book of Soul”). It wasn’t always this way: Ab-Soul has been a thoughtful writer in the past, making sense of fringe sciences and unorthodox philosophies with elastic rhyme schemes, gently massaging them to suit grand proclamations about society’s shortcomings or personal explorations for spirituality.

His new album, Do What Thou Wilt., named for the defining law of Crowley’s Thelemic philosophy, is the ultimate act of performative wokeness. His songs have become so abstract that very little happens in them anymore they’re all empty puzzles, mazes made of loosely parsed Greek myths, astrological information, and the unfinished script pages for National Treasure 3, meant to be mind-fucking but revealed to be mush when even gently interrogated. It’s fitting that Crowley, once dubbed the Wickedest Man in the World and written off as a Satanist for his musings about the supernatural, has been a source of inspiration for TDE’s syllable-twisting, in-house conspiracy theorist, who is becoming so information-obsessed that he seems to be losing sight of actual meaning-perhaps a bit woozy from inhaling around all the tomes and scrolls and manuscripts he’s been dusting off. It also reads like an Ab-Soul bar these days.

Ab soul control system album download zip