Sellout: the word perhaps most used by underground hip-hop heads more than any other in their entire vocabulary (and after a session of listening to Immortal Technique and Canibus, their vocabularies are big).  The underground powers that be will name any move for mainstream success, whether it be the addition of a white female singer or appearances in many films,  a move to sellout.  So their idols have to walk the thin line of being talented enough to be popular among them, but not to use that talent to sell records.  So this is where Talib Kweli, former member of Black Star & Reflection Eternal, has to be careful; he wants to sell records, but if he tries too hard and fails, his steady fanbase will leave.  Therefore, the Beautiful Struggle is the most important record of his career; whether it's his best is to be seen.

After the sonic twists & turns of his solo debut, Quality, it may be suprising Kweli opens this album with as mundane a song as "Going Hard".  It's actually a pretty enjoyable piece of music, with a rousing guitar-driven beat and a on-point Kwe, but the song sounds, as a whole, pretty generic.  He follows this with the utterly awful "Back Up Offa Me", a seriously bad collaboration with his old partener Hi-Tek.  Talib's pointless references to Ashanti & Kobe Bryant don't exactly make the radio-friendly song much better.  Talib soon partners with the Neptunes for "Broken Glass", that sounds downright strange.   While upon first listen, this may be an annoying song, it eventually comes off as an experimental team-up that is, if nothing else, charmingly ambitious.  "We Know" is basically an R&B song featuring Kweli, as Faith Evans sounds far more at home with the instrumentation then Talib.  His appeals to the ladies sounds pretty pathetic, but are nothing compared to the next track, "A Game".  It sounds more like Kweli freestyling over a leftover beat that Lil' Flip turned down than an actual fleshed out song on his album.  No lyrics could save that beat, and Kweli certainly doesn't give the type of rhymes that even come close.  He soon redeems himself on the Kanye West-laced inspirational anthem and first single, "I Tried".  Although it comes off as "Get By Part III" (Dilated Peoples' "This Way" was Part II), Mary J. Blige's stirring guest appearance and Talib's oblique observations help make this one of the album's choice cuts.  "Around My Way" is Talib Kweli at his best: soulful production accented with Kwe's examinations on those things familiar to him.  One of those is his neighborhood, in which "all the corners filled with sorrow/ all the streets are filled with pain".  John Legend adds his own beautiful falsetto to the track, and becomes the centerpiece with his trademark piano in th background.  However, Talib falls off again on the Dizzee Rascal-esque "We Got the Beat", where heavy guitars and synthesiers seriously do not help him at all.  He also trips over himself on the even more electronic-sounding, "Work It Out".  Hi-Tek donates him yet another bad beat on which he basically gives the listener a headache.  Talib's luck changes on the introspective "Ghetto Show", which features excellent crooner Anthony Hamilton and "Best MC Alive" nominee Common.  The beat is a dry soul-sampler, but Com and Kwe trade ruminative, yet accesible rhymes.  Talib even uses an inversion of Jay-Z's famous lines fom "Moment of Clarity": "If skills sold/ truth be told/ I'd probably be/ just as rich and famous as Jay-Z".  Jean Grae donates her services on the ear candy "Black Girl Pain", where Talib gets his grown man on as he muses on the greatness of the black woman.  The chorus is where the song reaches perfection with excellent lines like, "They just know the name/ they don't know the pain".  Just Blaze becomes the album's MVP on "Never Been in Love", as he gives Kweli yet another banger.  Talib should hug Just for giving him the chance to salvage his album, as Kweli shows why people ever considered him a better rapper than his co-Black Star Mos Def (he's still not better).  The album ends on the title track, where Kwe proves he's not a bad rapper, but rather a A+ student getting Cs for being lazy.  In lines like, "I speak in schools a lot cause they say I'm intelligent/ No, it's cause I'm dope/ if I was wack, I'd be irrelevant", Kweli shows his true colors and makes the hum-drum acoustic guitar beat an excellent backdrop for his pensive verses.

While most artists aren't happy with having to choose either sales or respect, Kweli always seemed like he was especially motivated to make it to be, as he said, "just as rich and famous as Jay-Z".  But with an album devoid of any Mos Def and seriously lacking of good Hi-Tek beats, he may have risked that extremely important underground base.  Whether he'll ever pull off the mainstream success he wanted is unknown; what we're sure of is that he certainly could if skill sold.

iPod Worthy: "Never Been in Love", "Black Girl Pain", "Around My Way", "I Tried"

Skippable: "A Game", "We Got the Beat", "Work It Out", "Back Up Offa Me"

Overall: 3.5 out of Six Shots