“Hip-hop used to be fun. I try to put a pinch of that in everything I cook up.”
Look, with a release titled My Cheese Budget is Growing (hilariously shortened to MCBIG) by Quintessential & Eddou XL, we could spend this entire space cutting the stinkiest, cheesiest puns. But this record deserves way better than that. Quintessential’s deep baritone and “percussive cadence” keeps it lighthearted with humorous lyrics (he must have a thing for powerful redheads, given the bizarre love letter to former White House press secretary Jen Psaki). Eddou XL’s jazzy, sample-heavy boom bap production keeps it old school in the best way. All of this brings to mind some of the best combos of years past: Doom and Madlib, Marley Marl and Biz Markie, and (locally) Dan the Automator and Kool Keith as Dr. Octagon. This is certainly one of the most entertaining hip hop records of the year, and I’m not going to “fold” in a cheese pun to finish off this review, whatever that means.
