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Caston introduced me to Kyles's work at the end of 2011, a few months after his friend died, and I made sure to download Kyles's final mixtape, Less Passion. More Ration. As Bennett told me a little more than a year later, Kyles dropped it just a few days before he died, and it's the last thing he posted on his In Rod We Lust Tumblr. The download link for Less Passion. More Ration still works, which I didn't expect—Kyles had uploaded the mixtape to the file-sharing site MediaFire, where in the past year or so plenty of downloaded pages have been taken down after remaining untouched for months. Anyway, I'm slowly reworking my way through Less Passion for the first time since I initially downloaded it, and though it's rough around the edges, Kyles's potential manages to poke through the toughest patches. Sometimes the lines don't quite fit right, but there are moments when Kyles's turns of phrase make everything work in spite of—or because of—the clunkiness of the rhymes (I'm particularly drawn to his lyric about advertising flashy clothing to impoverished people on "Rat Cabbit"), which makes me wonder how much he could have grown and what could have been. Check out Less Passion. More Ration for yourself and nab it quick from MediaFire.
Leor Galil writes about hip-hop every Wednesday.
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