Bleep

New Orleans rapper/entrepreneur Curren$y had brushed against hip-hop superstardom by the year 2010, but hadn’t yet eclipsed the spotlight of his most famous friends. A recent departee of hometown label Cash Money in what felt like the wake of Lil Wayne’s explosion, the rapper also known as Spitta also spent time in the No Limit bullpen before that, too. A go-to guest verse menace capable of drawing virtually any kind of rapper into his stoney and slow moving sonic world, Curren$y put in his 10,000 hours on the mixtape circuit, sharpening his lifestyle rap pen, finding the stranger pockets in those blunted loops he cherished like few else in the underground rap world of the time, and in turn building a die-hard fandom. But that true coming out moment eluded him, that is until whoever paired him with the producer of his dreams in 90’s New York head Ski Beatz.

The first Pilot Talk LP (produced almost entirely by Ski) presented Curren$y in a whole new light. Taking the skills he honed in the trenches on mixtapes and as a confidant in two of Southern rap’s most ascendant labels, the New Orleans man welcomed you into his world with a documentarian-like level of detail. You can practically feel the haze of smoke hovering around you as you dip into Pilot Talk’s sonic world of video games, fine food, and vintage cars. Curren$y throws some weight around bringing in the likes of Snoop Dogg and Mos Def here to signify this as an Event, but it’s fellow travellers like Big K.R.I.T. that really shine amidst Ski Beatz’s luxurious guitars, organs, and horns.

Sensing momentum, the pair struck quickly with Pilot Talk II just a few months later, and it too is another gorgeously rendered dip into Curren$y’s stoney world. Swapping lush psychedelia for smoothed out funk loops, there were no diminishing returns in the admirable followup to a legend-making comeback (of sorts). The third installment of the series came with some distance in between to grow the heart fonder, and it’s an aural delight to hear Curren$y slip back into shit talk mode over Ski Beatz’s preternatural melodic gift at emphasizing every punchline. Cars you can’t afford, meals you can’t pronounce, television shows too esoteric for you to understand, all of these things just sound better when it's these two behind the boards and the mic. A surprise fourth entry hit in 2021, and it too feels like a well-earned, and perfectly assembled victory lap.

Now 15 years on from the very first Pilot Talk, these records now feel like a unique and awe-inspiring entry point into an era of early internet-bred rap that feels ripe for coronation. Curren$y binds the whole collection in a deluxe box set (bringing three of these volumes to vinyl for the very first time) fit for the opulent vibe the man so flawlessly imbibes with the music within.