"Why should the world be over-wise / In counting all our tears and sighs?" 19th-century African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote. He's just trying to give his "FRIENDS" - and a generation laid to waste - one of the coping skills that's kept him from killing himself. Cole offers up his simplest advice ("meditate / don't medicate"), it's clear that he isn't interested in prescribing a cure-all for the culture. He even relives his own mom's formative battles with the bottle. He roots out the systemic cycles of inequality that fuel our post-traumatic stress disorders. He mocks the absurd quest for external validation we seek on social media. He holds up a mirror to the addictive behaviors mindlessly perpetuated in trap and Soundcloud rap. He assumes a shamanistic role, hell-bent on driving out the demons. Cole doesn't stop at diagnosing our ills. Cole's fifth studio album, there isn't one song or 16-bar verse that'll stick with me as much as the newly viral footage of a rapper caught in a drug-induced lean as he nods out in the middle of his Instagram Live broadcast. What impresses on the surface is her versatility as Cardi travels from trap to R&B to salsa on one of the biggest Latin crossover songs of the year, "I Like It." Cardi's bilingual, multivalent way of being is more than just adaptable: She walks into a song and it changes. From social media to reality television to the recording studio, she learned something crucial at each step – the flash of memes, the improvisational skill of comedy, the impeccable memory rap requires. Her words (sometimes co-written, which she freely admits) would be enough as Invasion of Privacy proves on every track, Cardi can be as funny as Eminem, minus the hate and self-seriousness as sensual as Drake and as casually musical as the guys in her rap family, Migos.Ĭardi demanded to play on whatever field she wanted from the beginning. Whether spitting street style in her debut album opener "Get Up 10" or trash talking with the stars (propositioning Rihanna and Chrissy Teigen for a threesome, NP) on "She Bad," the rapper always seems to go beyond mere words to attain a tangible presence in the room, or head, of any listener. Cardi B somehow incorporates this multi-sensory experience into every one of her raps, and that's what makes her debut album so much more than the year's most impressive commercial breakthrough. She's every sense at once: the visual shock of white lace and red velvet Jordans on a dancer's body the lip-smacking lure of plantains and pastelitos from a truck the fragrance of White Diamonds, like your grandma use to wear.
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Rodney CarmichaelĬardi B is a breath of fresh air full of car horns blasting as they crawl up Jerome Avenue. Meanwhile, the algorithm to chart her soul's progression has yet to be created. All this bone-deep work she's doing out in public to construct a world out of equal parts diligence and sacred indulgence isn't really for us: "Nah, actually this is for me," she raps on "Self." We're just fortunate enough to reap the benefit. Her voice is intimate, revealing, satirical, cerebral, always clever and forever questing. "The secret is I'm actually broken / I tried to raise a healing, kneeling at the edge of the ocean," she raps on "Don't Forget About Me." These are redemption songs, forged by Noname's attempt to reconcile newfound independence with the knowledge that her people will never truly be free. But it's really a trip to her soul, as she counts the wages of American sin, bartered success, oppressive politics, unrequited love and sexual liberation. On Room 25, she continues the coming of age narrative she began with her 2016 Telefone debut by letting us ride shotgun as she journeys and journals from the South Side of Chicago to uncharted territory.
Raised in the same Bronzeville neighborhood that birthed Gwendolyn Brooks' Pulitzer-winning work, Noname is hip-hop's unabashed poet laureate. It's a vivid reminder that, despite rap being the most-consumed genre, the industry has yet to devise a metric capable of accurately measuring the value of black genius. If not, I tried." Her timing coincided with the weekly release of the Billboard 200, where Room 25 failed to debut among the week's 200 best-selling and -streaming albums. I hope Room 25 means something to someone. "The way n***** consume music is so weird.
"This f*** around and be my last tape," she wrote in a since-deleted tweet. A week after releasing one of the best albums of the year, Noname tweeted out a missive that perfectly encapsulated the frustration of being a wildly creative, independent artist without major-label backing in 2018.
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