‘Rapper’s Rapper Meets Super Producer!’ reads like a recipe for anticlimax. But DA NGER MOUSE and BL ACK THOUGHT ’s Cheat Codes team-up, marinading for 16 years, is the hip-hop chef d’oeuvre that reinvents old-school classicism for 2022. “You’re who this record is for!” they assure DORIAN LYNSKEY.

Meeting of minds: Danger Mouse (left) and Black Thought settle some unfinished business.

ShervinLainez

THE ABSURDLY LONG ROAD TO 2022’S MOST WINNING HIP-HOP ALBUM began with a little bit of shoplifting. When The Roots released their second album, Do You Want More?!!!??!, in Januar y 1995, Brian Burton was a 17-year-old highschool student in suburban Atlanta. He couldn’t afford a copy so he paid a friend $10 to steal one for him, a reminder of how expensive CDs were in the 1990s. During schoolyard debates about the greatest MC of all time, Burton never wavered: it had to be Tariq Trotter, AKA Black Thought. “It was the cadence, it was the lyrics, it was the consistency,” Burton says fannishly. “He’s never done one mediocre verse. He was my guy.”

In 2004, now a producer trading as Danger Mouse, Burton created The Grey Album, a fiendishly clever and extremely unlicensed mash-up of Jay-Z’s The Black Album with The Beatles’ White Album which set EMI’s lawyers on his trail. The hullabaloo landed Burton on an industr y panel alongside Richard Nichols, The Roots’ late manager. “Rich was the ultimate gauge of character,” Trotter says. “For Rich to say, ‘Dude’s aight’ meant the fucking world. So that was my entrée into the world of Danger.”

Shortly thereafter, the two men started putting some tracks together under the not entirely serious name of Dangerous Thoughts. The collaboration was reported in the press in 2006 before life got in the way. The Roots were locked into a hectic cycle of recording and touring while Burton was racking up production gigs and making waves with his CeeLo Green collaboration Gnarls Barkley. Their album together became a nagging piece of unfinished business, neither resumed nor wholly abandoned.