Today in Hip-Hop: 14 Years Since Ab-Soul Dropped Control System

May 11, 2012. Ab-Soul drops Control System on a TDE that the mainstream hadn’t fully clocked yet. Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city is still five months away. Schoolboy Q’s Habits & Contradictions just landed four months back. Jay Rock is already out with Follow Me Home. And Ab-Soul — the third-eye-open kid from Carson — drops the album that quietly turned Top Dawg from a respected indie into the most-watched label in West Coast rap. Fourteen years later, the heads still hold it up.

The Album That Locked TDE

Control System was Soulo’s second album, but it’s the one that locked his identity. He’d just lost Alori Joh — his girlfriend, longtime artistic partner, and a vocalist who appears on the record — who passed in February 2012. The grief is all over it. “The Book of Soul” is one of the rawest seven-minute confessionals in 2010s rap: Soulo tracking his teenage years with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, his relationship with Alori, and her death, in chronological order. There’s no exit lane in that song. He puts you in it.

Production sits with TDE’s in-house engine room — Sounwave, Tae Beast, Willie B, Curtiss King — at peak chemistry, before anyone outside the building knew their names. “Pineal Gland” runs the psychedelic, third-eye flip that became Soulo’s whole signature: DMT references, cosmic numerology, conscious rap framed as occult study. “Terrorist Threats” lands a Danny Brown verse on top of a Jhené Aiko hook a year before Sail Out made her a household name. Kendrick, Schoolboy Q, and Jay Rock all guest across the tracklist — the full Black Hippy roster on one record, five months before GKMC turned everything supernova.

The Lineage It Carried

The lineage traces back to Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and the Native Tongues’ “knowledge of self” wing. Control System is what happens when that tradition gets refracted through 2010s LA — therapy-rap before therapy-rap was a marketable lane, conspiracy theory as personal liberation, the third eye as joke and weapon at the same time. Pitchfork gave it a 7.0. The heads gave it the keys to the conscious rap lineage for the next decade. Without Control System, there’s no SZA Ctrl arc, no Isaiah Rashad Sun’s Tirade trajectory, no Reason landing on TDE four years later.

If Control System pulled you in through the Black Star / Native Tongues door, we made tees for the foundation. Our Mos Def & Talib Kweli Black Star tribute is built for heads who connected those dots in 2012 and still ride for them.

Also Today in Hip-Hop

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2018 — Tee Grizzley releases Activated on 300 Entertainment, his debut LP after “First Day Out” cracked open Detroit’s next generation. Debuts at No. 10 on the Billboard 200 — his first top-10. 8 years today.
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1988 — Ace Hood is born. Florida-bred We the Best signee who turned “Bugatti” with Future and Rick Ross into one of the loudest hip-hop singles of 2013. 38 today.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team