However, these do not dilute the intensity of his conviction, or his ability as a rapper. With a soothing, warm tone and a rock singer’s range, Raury consistently brings beautiful melodies to the album’s alternative-leaning passages. Yes, crooning… this guy is the rare hip hop artist who sings arguably as well as or better than he raps. Raury’s major-label debut All We Need opens in dramatic fashion on the title track, with the young songwriter crooning “Who can save the world, my friend?” over soothing acoustic strumming. He makes a serious case for bringing activism back to the forefront of rap, while also pushing the boundaries of the genre in directions that haven’t been traveled in some time. He blends socially aware rhymes with stunningly beautiful soul and folk rock to create a sound uniquely his own. One could certainly make the argument that a genre founded on standing up to oppression has largely pushed its contemporary activist voices away from the mainstream, for better or worse.Įnter Raury Alexander Tullis, better known simply as Raury, an artist that seemingly came out of nowhere to take up a rising position on the fringes of hip hop. And don’t even get me started on Kanye’s inscrutable balancing act of social awareness and egotism. For every N.W.A., Nas or Lupe Fiasco that has spoken against injustice and inequality, it seems like there has been an equal number of artists throughout the genre’s history that have simply wanted to make fun party anthems. Perhaps no genre has had a more back-and-forth relationship with activism than hip hop. Yet the high-profile activism of pop music’s previous decades has largely given way to major artists paying lip service to 'safe' causes that already have broad support, while leaving hot-button topics to the wayside for risk of alienating fans. Superstar artists like U2 and John Lennon built reputations for taking seemingly massive and distant causes like world hunger and anti-war activism, and bringing them down to a human level - and it resonated with millions of fans, bringing these issues to previously untuned ears. Over the decades, popular music has had a complex relationship with social awareness. Review Summary: Big tent activism that thrills and hints at great things to come.

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