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As you probably already know, Young Jeezy's third album is going to be called The Recession. "Put On" is pretty great and all, but the Atlanta rapper also known as Jay "I fuck with John McCain" Jenkins will have to turn out to be, I dunno, a laid-off corrections officer or some shit if he's really going to go out of his coke-rap element and top this one. With "Something's Gotta Give" and "Royal Flush", the tracks we've heard so far from Big Boi's forthcoming Sir Luscious Left Foot ... Son of Chico Dusty solo LP, the Outkast member has put together two compelling arguments that formalist eminence and soulful real-world relevance need not be mutually exclusive. "Royal Flush" updates the unapologetically smart Southern wordplay of Aquemini's Raekwon-guesting "Skew It on the Bar-B"; "Something's Gotta Give" brings on the singer with arguably the best voice ever to grace an Outkast track, Mary J. Blige, and lets her be what Cee-Lo was to Stankonia's "Slum Beautiful", over a slimmed-down cousin to that track's humid, funky low-end.

"If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress," the video begins, quoting young Turk (not a Turk) Barack Obama. The pop-crit money has been on Andre 3000 lately, but Big Boi lays eloquent waste to every target in his sights on "Something's Gotta Give", like so: "The great debaters debate about who's the greatest MC/ Subject matter don't matter because their verses empty/ No room for thought, nothing for the brain to digest/ So I guess it be about who can jive talk the best." Ouch. Backed by an old-fashioned synth, Blige's hook is simple and effective, encompassing both the establishment's bootstraps bullshit ("They try to tell us to stay strong") and the grim reality of lost jobs. The clip shows not just the problems, but also one possible solution-- getting the fuck organized-- as Blige roots on Obama and sings about the soldiers with a matter-of-factness that always seems to make rockers choke. Toward the end, a deep voice adds ambiguity, arguing, "The world is too big." Come to think of it, the black-and-white American flags in the "Put On" video sort of remind me of the Stankonia cover. (via Nah Right)

[from Sir Luscious Left Foot ... Son of Chico Dusty; forthcoming on LaFace/Zomba]

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