In the follow-up to his debut album, Soul Sample, Prolif Kochise has fired his second shot into the air like a stranded sailor’s flare lighting up the darkness and signaling his location on a lost island. With Intellectual Property Kochise bring us to his island and allows us to look through his binoculars at what our music, our lives, and even our religious beliefs look like from the outside. With a smooth background of sampled soul pieces providing the backdrop for his sagacious yet fiery wordplay, Kochise offers a poignant and potent treatise on the property of our intellects. At the very beginning of the album Prolif warns us that “every bar is tactical”. I’ll take it even further and say that every bar, every topic, every bass drum and snare are just as tactical and well planned. The sultry thickness of the sampled bass lines still doesn’t manage to overtake the urgency in his rhymes as he states “I was done with rap music but for yall I sacrifice”. However, one thing he did not sacrifice was beats that become a mystic ear potion making your eardrums swoon. If we are honest with ourselves, I mean truly honest as consumers and critics of “good” music, we will all admit that if a better known artist created an album with joints like “I Used to Hate H.E.R.”, where Kochise illustrates his tug of war relationship with himself and his relationship with hip-hop, we would hail it as daring. We would say that it is creative to address Common’s classic with such a tricky spin. It’s gutsy. But since Prolif probably won’t be up in the Source or XXL magazines anytime soon, you’ll be tempted to brush him off as a gospel rapper. But, I implore you, don’t. The personality of Intellectual Property is one that is not found elsewhere in popular music at the moment. Much like the anecdotes in “Cosmetics”, we likely prefer to cover up any voice in us that tells us that the music we listen to and the proclivities it feeds are destructive. And therein lies the power of this artwork. For slightly over an hour Kochise not only refuses to let you muffle that voice that is pushing you toward your best self, he snatches it up and raps with it. He wields your own conscience like your soul’s Excalibur and really isn’t apologetic about whether or not he offends your sensitive “who is he to tell me I’m buggin’” instinct. With verbal exercises like the personification of a cell phone in “Miss Noki”, to the troubled yet slick narrative on deep thought in “Nothing”, to the mean, unlikable personality given to the television network of the same name as the track “Black Entertainment Television” creativity is in Kochise’s pocket as if he has a patent on it. There’s not a lot negative I can say about this album other than noting the overuse of audio snippets from commercials and speeches. In fact they fit so well that I can easily overlook the abundance of them. All I can say is, be careful with this album. Once you start playing the first track you become the intellectual property of Prolif Kochise and he will bend, push, pull you and shadowbox your chin until you are thoroughly acquainted with both who you are and who you have the potential to be if you can drown out the incessant banging of popular culture in your mind’s ear. Chad L. Downey for Marah Creative Media