Skyzoo and Apollo Brown have given us one of those Hip Hop partnerships where the reunion makes immediate sense. Their first album together, The Easy Truth, was one of our favorite albums of 2016, and ten years later Luxury Tax arrives with the same basic ingredients: Skyzoo’s dense Brooklyn lyricism, Apollo Brown’s dusty Detroit production, and a shared affection for the kind of album that rewards people who actually listen to the words.
Skyzoo has been one of our favorite rappers this century. We ranked him in our 50 Best Rappers of All Time list, and his catalog is one of the most consistently strong in Hip Hop, ever. That last point matters because Skyzoo is still strangely absent from a lot of top rapper discussions. Luxury Tax provides another reason to question that omission. His pen remains ridiculous.
The Brooklyn MC, born Gregory Skyler Taylor and raised in Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, came into Hip Hop through the mixtape era. Cloud 9: The 3 Day High, his 2006 collaboration with 9th Wonder, put his writing in front of a wider audience. From there came The Salvation, Live from the Tape Deck, A Dream Deferred, Music for My Friends, The Easy Truth, In Celebration of Us, Retropolitan with Pete Rock, All the Brilliant Things, The Mind of a Saint, and more. He has kept releasing music while maintaining a remarkably consistent standard.
Apollo Brown has taken a different route to a similar destination. Born Erik Stephens in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he became closely associated with Detroit‘s Hip Hop scene and built a catalog around producer-led collaborations. O.C. on Trophies. Guilty Simpson. Ras Kass. Joell Ortiz. Planet Asia. The Left. Ugly Heroes. Che Noir. His beats have always had a recognizable physical quality: hard drums, dusty samples, mournful keys, horns, organs, chopped soul vocals, vinyl crackle. He does not need a complicated formula: the kick lands, the sample hits, and the MC gets to work.
That approach was a particularly good match for Skyzoo. When they made The Easy Truth in 2016, Brown had Skyzoo come to Detroit and they built the album together in person rather than exchanging files over email. Brown has long preferred that process because he wants to see how an MC reacts to a beat in the room. The resulting album drew on the musical histories of New York and Detroit, giving Skyzoo a familiar lyrical home while putting him inside Brown’s Midwestern production style.
Ten years later, Luxury Tax picks up the conversation from a very different point in their lives. The title refers to the additional price attached to whatever you want in life. Money is part of it, although Skyzoo is thinking about something wider: sacrifice, attention, family, peace, reputation, and the personal cost of pursuing success. That idea gives the album its thread.
“Soapbox Two” is a brief opening before “Abundance” drops the listener into Apollo’s world. Soulful samples, heavy drums, a warm loop. Skyzoo comes out swinging, packing the verse with internal rhymes and the kind of obscure references that make you stop the track and rewind. He has always had an unusual ability to make technically complicated writing sound conversational. That skill remains intact.
“Detours” digs into the roads Skyzoo has taken to reach this point. The song has a reflective quality without turning sentimental. Memory is currency here, and the people attached to those memories remain important. Some are in prison. Some are dead. Some are still around and watching what happened to the kid who used to sit on the stoop. That tension runs through Luxury Tax. Skyzoo has moved forward without pretending that the past disappeared.
“God Given” is built around a bruising boom-bap groove, with Skyzoo taking stock of the career he has built over two decades. There is a quiet confidence in these songs. He knows his discography. He knows the work he has put in. He also knows that underground success has its own peculiar economics. “Learned Behavior” gets right into that subject. People question why an underground rapper talks so much about money. Skyzoo flips the criticism back toward them. Everybody wants money. Everybody understands status. Some people are simply more comfortable pretending otherwise.
Apollo Brown’s beats are ideal for this kind of writing because they give Skyzoo plenty of room. Brown rarely buries an MC under layers of unnecessary production. His samples create atmosphere, his drums provide the knock, and the rest is carefully placed around the rapper. “Table Manners” demonstrates that approach particularly well, using soulful instrumentation and a spoken interlude about dining etiquette to explore class, money, and pride. Skyzoo is particularly good when he takes a seemingly small detail and opens it up. The idea of needing a hand becomes a question about whether you need that help privately or publicly. A conversation about expensive dinners becomes a conversation about social expectations. His writing keeps moving.
“Rose Tinted” brings a jazzier feel, while Skyzoo describes himself through the strange combination of “part-time activist” and “part-time trapper.” That contradiction is central to his writing. He can use street language to discuss race and class without abandoning the language that shaped him; he does not have to choose between the corner and the classroom. “Scrape the Bowl” brings horns into Apollo’s production. There is a little more swagger here, with Skyzoo talking about possessions and the rewards of having accumulated some money. The vinyl collection is part flex, part evidence. This is somebody enjoying the material rewards of years spent working. “No Discounts” pushes that idea harder. Skyzoo has spent almost twenty years giving people records, touring, writing, and maintaining an audience without becoming a household name. He has no interest in reducing the price now. The production has a quicker soul sample that gives the song some extra movement.
“Hear Me Out” is one of the album’s strongest cuts. The keys are soothing with a darker edge underneath, and Skyzoo reflects on the people around him and the distance between his younger and older selves. He references mixtape culture, aging, gaming, and the accumulated experience of somebody who has been doing this since the early 2000s. That age matters. Skyzoo is no longer trying to prove he belongs, he is documenting what happened after he got there.
“The Blind Spot” brings Blu and Elzhi into the picture. This is the obvious lyrical centerpiece, and the three MCs attack the track from different angles. Blu discusses the strange position of being widely respected while remaining commercially overlooked. Elzhi turns his verse into a sustained exercise in “I” and “eye” wordplay. Skyzoo responds with the kind of multi-layered writing that has made him one of our favorite MCs for years. It is a pure Hip Hop moment. Three rappers. One beat. No gimmicks required.
“Under the Lights” adds soulful background vocals and gives Brown another opportunity to build a large arrangement around relatively simple ingredients. The record has a little more lift, although the drums still hit with that familiar Apollo Brown weight.
Then comes “The Rearview.” The strings give the closer a cinematic quality, while the title brings the album’s central idea full circle. The record began with a drive and ends with Skyzoo looking backward at the road he has traveled. The luxury tax is not the money. The money is part of the reward. The tax is everything that had to be sacrificed along the way.
That makes Luxury Tax a fitting second chapter to The Easy Truth. The two albums share a musical foundation and a trust between MC and producer, although Skyzoo and Apollo Brown have accumulated another decade of life in between them. Their chemistry remains obvious. Apollo knows how to give Skyzoo enough space to write, and Skyzoo knows exactly how to attack an Apollo Brown beat.
Brown’s production is familiar without sounding tired. There are dusty samples, thick drums, horns, strings, keys, soul vocals, and occasional changes in tempo. He has spent years refining this approach, and he still knows how to make it hit. His production belongs to a lineage that includes Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Large Professor, Dilla, and the darker end of 1990s New York Hip Hop, although Apollo’s Midwestern identity is always present.
Skyzoo is the real story, though. He has spent twenty years building a catalog that rarely receives the recognition it deserves outside dedicated Hip Hop circles. His work with 9th Wonder, Torae, Pete Rock, and Apollo Brown alone would give another rapper a substantial career. Then there are the solo records, conceptual projects, EPs, collaborations, and the endless accumulation of sharp verses.
Luxury Tax gives him another excellent setting in which to demonstrate what he can do. The album is dense without becoming exhausting. Personal without becoming confessional for its own sake. Technical without turning into an exercise in rhyme mechanics. Apollo Brown supplies the kind of beats that make you want to nod your head before you have even processed what Skyzoo is saying.
That is the appeal of this partnership. They understand traditional Hip Hop and know how to work inside it without making music that sounds stuck in the past. Skyzoo has been one of our favorite rappers this century. Apollo Brown has been one of our favorite producers this century. The Easy Truth remains one of our favorite albums of 2016. Given that history, it should come as no surprise that Luxury Tax hits for us.
And perhaps the bigger point is Skyzoo himself. He is hardly ever mentioned when people start naming the greatest rappers. After another album this strong, that absence becomes harder to understand. His catalog has the depth. His writing has the technique. His consistency is almost absurd. Luxury Tax adds another piece to the case.
8.5/10
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