Homeboy Sandman - Kindness for Weakness (2016)

Kindness for Weakness probably isn’t the best Homeboy Sandman album, though it may be. One of the many things we can hope to remind ourselves in the wake of Prince’s death is that “streaks” can be shortchanged in favor of “moments.” We get it, it’s hard to make “career” sound sexy in rock’n’roll. Relativity scans but it doesn’t always sink in; it’s hard to convince a music fan that one artist’s seventh, ninth, and 13th-best albums are as important as the top tier. Nothing wrong with being tired and wanting new blood, but we’re not going to glean the best of what’s out there if we don’t do that mental legwork — if we don’t remind ourselves that conventional metrics favor hares over tortoises. Homeboy Sandman is a tortoise, according to the industry-scaling equipment that greets Drake with social-media blackouts, though it’s completely absurd to think of a talker this fast and clever as a tortoise.

The idea of applying algorithms to music — our soul’s soundtrack — probably horrifies the rapper born Angel Del Villar II in general, as the thinking man’s thinking man is on record with middlewoke opinions on artificially sweetened drinks (“If you trying to drink some soda you should not come over”) and the since-rechristened Clear Channel (“Can kiss my ass cheek”). Shouldn’t be a surprise that he outs himself as an Instagram latecomer on his sixth full-length’s amazing centerpiece “Talking (Bleep),” where his sometime employer Huffington Post is sacrificed to the gods of rhyme in order to marry “gumption” and “dumb s**t.” But the verse implying he’s polyamorous? The occasional “she was a bitch?” Homeboy Sandman isn’t your typical op-ed-writing polemicist. He’s not what they used to call a “conscious” rapper either, not with his on-record disavowal of dental dams. Right, that title — don’t mistake his “kind” for weak.