Every Sunday, the TDE lyrical powerhouse, Ab-Soul, drops a new piece of music. Be it freestyle or remix, he showcases his skills and celebrates hip hop history. This Sunday, he hopped on Marshall’s 1996 track “Infinite”.
Conversation with the classic
The way Ab-Soul flipped this beat is a masterclass in studying greatness and building your own legacy right next to it. He posted a link to the collection of his Sunday drops, where the song lives now.
The TDE artist preserved the soulful, dreamy flavour of the beat and layered it with choppy, aggressive, very focused delivery that Denaun Porter and Eminem adopted on this record in the early 1990’s.
Lyrically, Ab-Soul firmly stays in the conversation with Em structurally – echoing his opening lines on the intro, contradicting him on the chorus by switching Hell to Heaven, picking up Marshall’s rhyming schemes. It is a work worth studying on its own. But also, it is likely to draw more attention to Em’s early record.
History of Infinite
For all intents and purposes, Infinite was meant to be Eminem’s breakthrough record. He worked with Denaun Porter on the project that would capture radio plays. Marshall was expecting the birth of his daughter, Hailie, and thought about her future, both practically and metaphysically. That’s why he talks about these concepts of infinite time and the vastness of space. And that’s why the complete commercial flop of the album pushed Marshall to the brink. Still, he survived, reinvented himself, became the best selling rapper in the world and gave Hailie the future he wanted her to have.
Later, Marshall would call Infinite “not a good album”. But it was a stepping stone in his career. A stage where he was expressing his understanding of the rap game and the life workings. The album where Mr. Porter deliberately slowed Marshall down so listeners could understand every word rapped.
Infinite, the album, was released on vinyl and, mostly, cassettes. You can only find one track on streaming platforms, the eponymous “Infinite”. At the moment, it has 49,422,330 plays on Spotify. Let’s see how this number changes over the next week.
