Rapper and producer iNTELLECT first introduced himself as an artist with his 2015 debut album, Revolution. Placing his Christian faith in the foreground of his music, he has since released a handful of projects including 2017’s The Mandate. Now, he is returning to his beginnings with a remixed and extended version of his inaugural effort.
“Revolution was the first project where I really tried to build songs around a centralized theme,” he says. “The initial inspiration for Revolution was the fact that who I am as an artist and what I believe as a Christian make me counter-cultural. The fact that I don’t subscribe to how society wants Hip-Hop to sound or how society wants me to think makes me distinctly different. Revolution in essence represents a breaking away from the box that society would choose to place me in. But as Revolution is a breaking away of sorts for me as an artist, the album looks to call both America and the Christian Hip-Hop genre back to their respective roots. Christian Hip Hop used to be focused on ministry and the communication of the gospel message but has now become obsessed with commercialization and has even gone as far to mimic secular trends.”
The album features snippets from various speeches made over 30 years ago. All of the sampled speeches emphasize the concepts in iNTELLECT’s lyrics and imbue Revolution with an element of propheticism, as the speakers are discussing issues looming on the horizon of the 1960s which have since come into fruition. Also inherent to the album’s message is the political nature of the song titles, each of which iNTELLECT cleverly “spins” into a twist.
