Consumer Guide Album

Apollo Brown & Che Noir: . . . As God Intended [Mello Music, 2020]
Forty-one-year-old Detroit alt-rap bro boosts 27-year-old Buffalo sister who instead of becoming a certified nursing assistant like the breadwinners who bore and raised her went into the hip-hop business to make her nut. Sampling James Baldwin and Rihanna, Scarface and Solomon Burke and Foxy Brown's "You tell me what I'm supposed to do with all this ambition I got," she lives by the credos "What's worse than being physically dead is mentally dying" and "Do it twice as better 'cause you got the skin of a slave." The problem she hasn't solved yet is putting her "father's mistakes" out of her mind, a failure that costs her boyfriend his life in a genuinely shocking track we'll assume is fictional as we thank the innocent bystander from Detroit for helping her put it across. A-