The Affair

During a safari in Nepal with his girlfriend, Joe is unbelievably chosen as the chief of a mystical tribe and is filled with magic power. When Joe is back to Hong Kong, a slave girl from the tribe helps him and gives him the token of authority. The two also fall in love. The Messenger of Evil from Nepal comes to attack Joe for the token. The sacrifice of the slave girl compels Joe to fight desperately against the Evil.

Ever since his HOT 97 10-minute freestyle rework of Rising Down highlight "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)" blew minds in December 2017, Roots’ MC Black Thought has spent a lot of time and energy reasserting his bona fides as a hyper-lyrical powerhouse. But while the skills-recognizing aspect to his revival provides more strong reminders than unexpected epiphanies, he's also been able to better embody the humanistic side of his art along the way. Glorious Game, his collaboration with veteran Brooklyn psychedelic-soul instrumentalists El Michels Affair, embodies this better than anything else to emerge in a strong run that also gave us his Streams of Thought series and his Danger Mouse collab Cheat Codes. You could throw a bit of credit for that to the atmosphere the Affair brings as a backing band: for a certain generation of hip-hop head, their collective ear for funk's stranger, blearier qualities that have been honed from years of RZA reconstructions and retro-cinematic takes on grainy soul-jazz can dredge up some remarkably powerful imagery just on its own.