Back in 2003, Michael Caine was on a press junket publicizing his then-current project, Secondhand Lions. In the movie, he and Robert Duvall are a pair of geriatric action heroes living in Texas, when they are forced to play nursemaid to their 14-year-old nephew (Haley Joel Osment). In an interview on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, the very British Caine explained how his accent coach helped him achieve his character's impressive Lone Star lilt. He said that the King's English has a stiff, upright pronunciation. Think of someone with good posture in a heavily starched shirt. The Texan, on the other hand, 'llows his words to lay down on top o' one 'nother like they're jes settin' a spell. Caine's demonstration provided not only entertainment, but also some homespun wisdom about the intricacies of regional dialect patterns. Certainly there is something inherently musical about southern speech, with its prolonged drawl and lazy cadences. Indeed, nowhere is the hip-hop concept of "flow" used quite so instructively as when describing southern rap. Pharrell once described T.I. as the "Jay-Z of the south," but listening to King, I admit I didn't quite see the connection at first blush. Then it dawned on me that while the two artists share a background in drug dealing, what really unites them is delivery. One of Jay-Z's strengths - among many - is his otherworldly ability to rhyme words that on paper have no business rhyming. No ready-made example springs to mind at the moment, but, depending on the context, he could make a word like "car" line up with "there" in one verse and "her" in the next, without allowing such enunciative license to undermine the structural foundation upon which his lyrics are built. T.I. takes this effect and applies it to whole lines, bending them at will. Plenty of rappers are "lyrical," in this sense of the word. 2Pac, Snoop Dogg, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony - all benefited from their sing-song styles. And "rapping to the beat" has been standard operating procedure since Wonder Mike. But T.I. does something extra. He doesn't rap over a beat so much as he raps in it. There's a peculiarly chameleonic quality to the way his voice takes on the shape of its surroundings, whether it's the sound of a Blaxploitation soundtrack ("King Back"), 90s dance club boilerplate ("Why You Wanna"), or the quiet storm of contemporary R&B ("Live in the Sky"). Perhaps his most impressive shape-shifting feat is coming off like the third member of OutKast, his fellow Atlantans, on "I'm Talking to You," where his pace on the last verse threatens to overtake the beat itself, having long since left most listeners behind. Grade: B+
