To the delight of hip-hop fans, old heads and genre purists, Sept. 5 heralded the return of legendary hip-hop emcee LL Cool J delivering his new record “The FORCE” after an 11-year hiatus. “The FORCE” (standing for Frequencies Of Real Creative Energy) is the meticulous product of LL Cool J’s long-time label Def Jam Records, a titanic studio within the hip-hop industry. On this new album, LL Cool J (whose birth name is James Todd Smith) delivers 14 tracks over 44 minutes of transcendently relevant and fresh hip-hop music. Despite his veteran status and long time out of the rap game, he sidesteps reiteration with a diverse slew of collaborations and a pervading ethereal hardcore hip-hop production style. “The FORCE” packages old-school East Coast rap rhyme and beats within the forward-facing auditory soundscapes of veteran producers, spawning a powerful synthesis of content and form.
The power and acclaim of “The FORCE” should not come as a surprise—LL Cool J is one of the most groundbreaking hip-hop artists, a pioneer whose influence on the genre is undeniable. His early 1984 single “I Need a Beat” helped define the spare production and aggressive flow that would characterize mid-80s hip-hop, cementing his status as a seminal creator. The artist built on his sparse, brash sound with a series of commercially successful releases such as 1987’s “Bigger and Deffer,” which sold over two million copies in the United States, and 1990’s “Mama Said Knock You Out,” which went double Platinum. LL Cool J’s innovation and success have been recognized with his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021 and when he became the first rapper to win the Kennedy Center award, emblematic of a legacy far exceeding just the cultural sphere of rap music.
LL Cool J has been among the most integral voices in the classic hip-hop canon, but as his stature has risen, his successful career as an actor has eclipsed his work in music production. He appeared in Barry Levinson’s film “Toys” (1992), “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later” (1998), and various other movie roles until landing in “NCIS: Los Angeles” (2009). There, LL Cool J starred as Navy SEAL Sam Hanna for 14 years, a prominent role that has become a focus of his career. He is also a consummate entrepreneur, having released a clothing line, written four books and founded a music label. Over this time, LL Cool J’s music output has dwindled, resulting in his apparent retirement from contemporary hip-hop culture—he even announced his retirement in a 2015 post, which was then deleted.
LL Cool J’s gravitation away from the hip-hop music he shepherded is all the more reason why the strength of “The FORCE” surprises and delights. Across this album, he takes a myriad of sonic approaches spanning tones, cultural influences and production styles. The opening track, “Spirit of Cyrus,” is a menacing and cryptic gangsta rap track featuring Snoop Dogg and a call for abolitionary violence, setting the tone for LL Cool J’s modernized sonic experimentation within a classic hip-hop space. The vocals are solid and relentless, but the real magic, here and in the rest of “The FORCE,” is the electro-funk production by Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest. Q-Tip is as prolific a producer as LL Cool J is a rapper and brings a relentless inventiveness track over track, synthesizing a plethora of glossy and mysterious beats, samples and musical accompaniments. Q-Tip’s production stews within the traditions of soul and funk with a faux-electro production, deploying head-slapping juxtapositions and left-field samples into every track. Generative and exploratory, Q-Tip never lets an idea or sound last long enough to disrupt the album’s consistent sonic heterogeneity.
The variety of music on “The FORCE” moves quickly and surprises you at every turn. For example, “Black Code Suite” starts with a rap describing how the legacy of slavery permeates everyday life. Then, the song musically shifts gears, and the last two minutes feature a kora played by virtuoso Sona Jobarteh over the chorus “Read your Black Code.” The middle-of-album track “Huey in the Chair” sees LL Cool J comparing his prolific contributions to Black social consciousness to Huey P. Newton, and this is punctuated by the comedically throaty delivery of Busta Rhymes and a jittery 6/8 drum groove sampled from “Halleluwah” by the Krautrock band Can. On “The FORCE,” LL Cool J explores Black social consciousness and politics through allusions to Black Panthers and influential thought leaders, linking the bluster and bravado of gangsta-rap to a refined ideological militarism honed in defense of hip-hop’s racial history. LL Cool J is known for his R&B songs and lighter cultural production as much as his rap persona, so the emergence of his hard-edged political thought in “The FORCE” indicates 11 years of philosophical refinement influencing both sonic aesthetics and lyrical content.
The album closes with “The Vow,” which spotlights three unsigned rappers: Pablito, J-S.A.N.D. and Mad Squablz. LL Cool J is a perpetual collaborator and invites listeners and his contemporaries to dwell within and generate new findings across the music, each track of “The FORCE” being a mosaic of honed creative choices. Hip-hop is an inherently exploratory artistic presence that resists easy compartmentalization and rebels against established cultural mores. LL Cool J channels hip-hop’s regenerative ethos by harnessing the productive tensions of eclectic sounds and samples, including contemporaries to create an album that represents the sum of many discrete parts.
While LL Cool J’s acting gig and side businesses might have cemented him as a legacy act, forever a prior innovator rather than a current voice, he has returned to music with undeniable vigor and enthusiasm to share the creative process with his peers. For returning acts who cast a shadow as long as LL Cool J has over hip-hop, a grand return is often retreading one’s initial successes; instead, he opts to take his distinctive style and work with the personnel and sounds of a new hip-hop generation. “The FORCE” represents LL Cool J’s modernization of his oeuvre in an evolving hip-hop landscape by tapping new frequencies of authentic, creative expression to make up for lost time.