Beauty…Or A Beast? (Stand Up or Fall Back Issue)

I have admitted before that some of my choices are made by the simple fact of gender. A beautiful woman will always catch your eye. It’s a truth you cannot escape. Even if you’re homosexual, heterosexual, or undecided the adage holds true.
Case in point, Lolah Brown.

As a contributing hip-hop writer I troll a lot of hip-hop sites. In my searches I am almost always brought towards livemixtapes.com. It’s a pull that I cannot escape after seeing what the mainstream artists are doing on the mixtape scene I glance at the indie scene. Along that walk I happened upon the album cover of Lolah Brown’s Black Lily.

The girl’s absolutely beautiful. But then my more analytical side kicks in, wondering if the music matches the looks. It was my duty to see if it did and share the results with our rabid readers.

Here’s what I’ve got. Aside from the looks she is wonderfully talented. This mixtape is physical (or digital if we’re being more technical) proof of that.

Rapper GLC lends his voice to the intro, a track called “Lolah's Ism”. I found it fitting and clever how the background of this introduction is held together by the Broadway musical classic “Whatever Lola Wants”. This seems to set the tone for the mixtape well.

It progresses as many female R & B albums and/or mixtapes progresses and I am happy for it. I dig the R & B feel that most female artists bring to the table.

Amongst the tracks I have found the ones that I truly enjoy.

For example, I really loved listening to “Take Flight”. I appreciated the throbbing tempo of the beat right before Miss Brown’s comes in so sweetly. To me “Take Flight” sounds like that sweet sort of R & B track you’d get from Keyshia Cole. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I am such of a fan of this one.

“Once Upon A Time” is amazing, too. Something about the sultry quality of the guitar is entrancing. On the same token “The Last Day” does the same with a different set of strings, violins this time. Even with one verse the song is powerful enough to stand on it. Conversely, another stringed sonic sonnet (“Open Letter” with a return to guitars) has more verses and is just as emotionally strong if not more so.

Lolah Brown drew me in with pure beauty as most flowers do. But when I explored this ‘black lily’, I discovered something more than beauty. Maybe you’ll discover it, too.


*Review Courtesy of Lucius Black for @RoyaltyMagazine