The Stimulus Package

The collaboration between Seattle beat maker Jake One and Philly rapper Freeway is definitive of a new creative model for rap music: one producer from one part of the country links with a rapper from another part of the country in the service of a lean, focused album with a minimum of guests and gimmicks. The Stimulus Package is clearly meant to echo the fundamentalist values of old-school hip-hop culture without resorting to nostalgia or imitation. The songs are well crafted and straightforward, laced with vintage soul samples that don’t mimic the 2001-era old-style of Kanye West, but rather seem to conjure the voices from an earlier generation of hardworking black voices. This effect is best experienced on “Money,” in which Freeway recounts a lifetime of hustles — from sweeping hair in the barbershop to “sellin’ incense and oils to all the people there”— over a mournful sample from 24 Carat Black’s 1973 song “Poverty’s Paradise.” Freeway’s final verse from the same song epitomizes the album’s ethos.