Curtis Cross, the man behind Black Milk, illustrates a world that's slightly demented, or just dented. It's been played out. It's been used and abused. It's so worn in that it knows exactly how to treat the fleshy things that scurry about in it. It knows that it should try to shake them off like fleas or lice. It knows that it has all manner of method available to it to try to remove the blights. Somehow the blights continue to cling to it.
It can be tough to keep an equilibrium out there in the throes of it all. It can be tough to gather enough of a pocketful to continue to eat and live. It can be impossible to feel as if you're getting anywhere when you're just treading water. You might just need to stay there and try to get a little sun as you float. There's anger and frustration in Black Milk music. It's from getting fucked with, from getting fucked over, but it comes from a place of studied and proven disadvantage. It comes from that memory/reality of being sent to the convenience store as a child to buy your mother's pack of cigs, as he writes about here on "Black Sabbath," but it's more about not ever distancing oneself from those days. It's perhaps even about sending your own kids out for those cigs now, without even realizing that you're doing it. There's nothing here that gets rose-colored here. All that Cross raps about is of a very grimy, soured hue and it will always be around.