Credit: Album Cover

When work on his second album began, West Coast rapper Ab-Soul couldn’t have predicted the tragedy that would ultimately come to define it.

The record, Control System, began as it should have, with Ab-Soul working on it alongside his high school sweetheart, Alori Joh. She recorded vocals on a couple of tracks, but, before the album was completed, her life ended. The album, unexpectedly, came to serve as a tribute to her life.

On February 7, 2012, a bleak news story began to be reported on. A young woman had died by suicide after jumping off a radio tower. This woman, it later emerged, was Loriana Johnson, aka the rising musician Alori Joh. She was Ab-Soul’s partner. 

Alori Joh and Ab-Soul had been going out with each other since they were kids. They met in high school, and they had been together from that time until her death. They had even become affiliated with the same label, Top Dawg Entertainment. Their lives were so closely entwined.

When Ab-Soul was preparing for Control System, the follow-up to his debut album Longterm Mentality, he enlisted Joh’s help. She contributed to the songs ‘Empathy’ and ‘A Rebellion,’ but those songs would thereafter take on an undeniably tragic quality. In light of her death, it is difficult not to be moved by her vocal contributions to those songs.

Most of the album had been completed by the time Joh had died, which Ab-Soul himself was grateful for. Had the project not been at such an advanced stage, he is unsure if he would have been capable of finishing it, as he admitted to The Fader in 2012.

“I was actually pretty much done with the project before that happened,” he said. “Luckily for me and all of us cause I definitely don’t think I would have been able to put it out in the time that I did. It was difficult. It’s still very difficult. She helps me out with all of my projects.”

It should go without saying that this was a remarkably trying period in Ab-Soul’s life, and actually getting through it—while finishing and promoting an album—was harrowing. But, as he explained, he did it with Joh in mind. “It’s a very difficult thing to get over but at the same time this is what we’ve been – we, me and her, were working on for the majority of the time I’ve known her,” he said. “She was one of my biggest supporters so I feel like I owe her and I owe everybody else that’s taken a liking to what we’re doing.”

The sleeve of Control System featured a dedication to Joh on the back. It read, “Dedicated to the beautiful soul of Loriana Angel Johnson, aka Alori Joh.” But that wasn’t the only tribute to her. While much of the album had been completed before she died, Ab-Soul did work on another track after the tragedy had occurred—and it explicitly dealt with his grief at losing her.

At the end of the album stands the song ‘The Book of Soul,’ in which an emotional Ab-Soul speaks of the trials that he has experienced in life ever since he was a kid. He reflects on his experience of the serious skin condition Stevens-Johnson syndrome, which he developed as a child, before talking about his struggles in highschool before meeting Alori Joh—“ the hottest hottie in the school,” as he put it.

The song reflects on how their relationship developed, taking them from high school sweethearts to adults trying to make it in the music business. He implies that it wasn’t always easy, but they always came back together no matter what. “Seven whole years, seven whole years,” he raps. “It was supposed to end with our grandkids.”

Ab-Soul then uses the song to express the agony of his loss. “Your picture’s still on my mirror, and it’s so scary,” he laments. “I swear I still ain’t looked at your obituary.” The song doesn’t ever reach any closure, as such, because there isn’t any closure to be found in a loss so raw and recent. But it is an honest expression of grief, and a beautiful one at that. It is not the ending of the album that he would ever have wished for. But, in light of the tragedy that happened, it is the perfect one.