LITTLE BROTHER’S ‘MAY THE LORD WATCH’ AND THE JOYS OF GROWN-ASS HIP-HOP

May the Lord Watch, the first album of new music from North Carolina hip-hop group Little Brother in nearly a decade, runs for a tight 37 minutes. I’m pretty sure having the album come in just a bit over a half-hour was a highly calculated move on their part.

In a time when even the most high-profile rappers still don’t know how to properly wrap up a project (Chance the Rapper’s recently-released, full-length studio debut The Big Day goes on and on and on for an exhausting one hour and 17 minutes), Little Brother is not out to waste the times of listeners, who are just as old as they are now, with superfluous songs and skits that could’ve been easily taken out of the equation. After all, Little Brother now consists of two middle-aged men — rappers Phonte Coleman and Thomas Louis Jones III (aka Rapper Big Pooh) — who are officially too old for the bullshit.

Then again, Little Brother has always been a hip-hop group that preferred being pragmatic and economical over being excessive and ghettofabulous. When they came on the scene with their debut 2003 album The Listening, Coleman and Jones, along with producer/DJ Pat “9th Wonder”…