Calling it early. Hip Hop Album Of The Year.
Has got to be JID's 'The Forever Story' (Dreamville)
TLDR version - play loud, play often, play particularly when in a transportation device or when transporting yourself by walking. It’s a hard thing to stay still to, even when wasted, so clear space.
TLDRBMRTS (Toolongdidntreadbutmightreadthestandfirst) version - Atlanta rapper JID last dropped a full-length four years ago (‘DiCaprio 2’) and I first heard him on 2017’s ‘The Never Story’. The promise shown there gains full fruition here - this is an amazing record, deep, funny, shocking, hook-laden, bass heavy and as waywardly engrossing as prime Outkast, as gritty and graceful and glorious as hip hop gets in 2022, and one of the most engrossingly sealed-in holistic albums I’ve heard all year. You get bound up in it.
Full version - Alot of rappers at the moment are really good at telling you what they’ve done and who they’ve done it to, and what they’ve been through, and how it proves something about them. Some of them forget that the time you spend with them in listening to their music should also entertain and delight you. The darkest Drill should make you smile, not because of its sound (that’s more likely to make you frown and focus and relish every brackish drop) but because of the poetic landing of syllables - that’s what makes you smile, and roll your eyes, and chuckle about hip hop. It should be - or can be, a pleasure to be in the company of at times. It should be sharp and witty and possessed of its own inimitable poetic imprint, given to it by that rapper’s past certainly, but not curtailed entirely by it. It’s precisely the iruptive, street-to-stratosphere possibility inherent in rap lyrics that shows humour (that vital sign of smartness but also existentially that vital sign of self-pitilessness), that shows a real understanding of where struggles leave you and the tactics - mentally, verbally and hence poetically - you employ to fend off the darkness. JID’s ‘Forever Story’ puts a massive smile on your face. That might seem like a little thing but it aint - my god, the amount of acclaimed albums in hip hop this year (particularly in the world of ever-diminishing deliberately old-skool dankness - too much profligacy, too MUCH music) that are utterly bereft of joy and delight. I’m not saying I want happy music. But I want a little less cosmetic despair, some humour amidst the gallows. And JID gives me that in spades.
After the glowing radiant little intro that is ‘Galaxy’ you’re plunged - through a gratifyingly juxtaposed Last Poets sample into ‘Raydar’ and the beats and bass have you in their icey, smokey hold - precisely tethered together for maximal impact, JID’s lines like mercurial lyrical rivulets skittering across the humping, heavy undertow. These are Trap dynamics but every track here is a little mini-oddyssey in itself - as soon as JID feels a motif is played out he’s so brimming with ideas he takes the track in another direction, shifting into a Drill-like bass-heaviness that’s instantly addictive. ‘Dance Now’ is wonderfully gloomy, wonderfully misnamed (the character impelling you to dance is Satan himself and he sounds exactly like Beavis in cornholio mode), and strafed with the deeply soulful melodies and harmonies (and Jamaican touches) that lift the whole album away from one-noteness. My personal highlight is the fantastic ‘Crack Sandwich’ - a rugged, Pete Rock-like beat and a spiralling little whorl of looped guitar that gets increasingly tremoloed and weirded out as the track progresses - JID’s lines as ever both shoring up his roots but also suggesting a present of measured and mature mayhem, and if ‘we ain’t got cheeseburger money, make a sandwich’ isn’t the sharpest hook of the year I’m not listening properly.
A word about the collaborators - it’s a dazzling cast list including James Blake, Thundercat, BADBADNOTGOOD, Khrysis, DJ Khalil, Kaytanadra but at no point do you NOTICE and that’s a remarkable trick to pull off, down to the solidity and authority of JID’s rhymes, but also the sense throughout that this has been crafted not as a selection of tracks but as a holistic vision, a vision as the sleeve makes plain, of black life - and black history - in America in 2022. ‘Can’t Punk Me’ - structurally and in a bass sense, is almost like boombap but the beats remain thoroughly modern and contemporary throughout (and thankfully there’s not even a whiff of old b-boy nostalgia or moaning on the album). ‘Surround Sound’ uses the same Aretha sample you should know from Yasiin Bey’s ‘Ms Fat Booty’ but uses it BETTER - chopping it until it becomes a scattered yelp of protest and anger before the whole track slides into this mindblowing (very UK Drill-like) lunge of liquid dark low-end and fragmented mindlint gospel-rap. That anger is never far from the surface of ‘Forever Story’ but it’s never allowed to overwhelm things - rather you get a liveable-with balance between fury and resignation, godless doom and the faint promises of faith, as crystallised perfectly on the lambently warm ‘Kody Blu 31’, gorgeous Adrian Younge-like strings unfurling over a beat/vocal matrix I can only compare to the most wonderful work of Mourning [A] BLKStar.
As ‘Forever Story’ enters its final suite you can’t quite believe how the sky-high standards are being maintained cos the first side has set such an astonishing benchmark - ‘Bruddamen’ and ‘Sistanem’ form the two hookiest, poppiest things here but JID never feels like he’s struggling between singing and rapping (he’s got a great singing voice) and the tracks never feel like they’re TRYING to become hot-tracks, just naturally latch themselves into your head totally irresistably. ‘Can’t Make You Change’ again slips into different movements and sections, always compellingly- sonically recalling the Durand Jones/BLKStar end of retro funk (absolutely love the threaded in Hammond and delicacy and CARE of the arrangements), but every time JID steps to the steel mesh any retrograde-fears abscond with the sheer direct heat of his rhyming.
While I’m here PLEASE TO BE UTTERLY DISREGARDING the Pitchfork review that says the sequencing of this album ‘lets it down’ - the sequencing is fucking flawless on this album and you realise this as you get close to the end that you don’t want to come. The remarkable ‘Stars’ starts off close to pure glittering Laraaji-style ambience, then becomes a hypnotic glow of slo-mo orchestrally-lit Trap, JID seemingly able to speed and slow his vocals mid-line in a way that almost recalls Prince’s ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’. Lil Wayne drops jewels on the kinda-summative ‘Just In Time’, ‘Money’ hinges on some gloriously kinder-psychedelic vocals from what sounds like a kids choir and a rotational jabby slab of funk, ‘Better Days’ is a plangent, gorgeous look back and nervous look forward before this masterpiece evanesces itself out of existence on the gloriously forlorn, broken ‘Lauder Too’, perhaps the closest we get to JID’s inner animus, Thundercat’s amazingly precise bass giving the verses huge propulsion before the choruses enfold you in heavily processed, almost-beatless vocal wonder. The first time you hear this album you will think FUCK I need to hear that again at this point. The second time you will already have set your player to repeat. As the days go by you’ll increasingly find yourself putting this album on wherever you are - not to necessarily penetrate things you missed, but just to bask in what feels like a rarity, a hip hop album in 2022 without a fucking attitude of arrogance or injured vengeance or monomania, a full, giving, generous and open artistic expression rather than a closed off defensive business statement.
Like I say, a BIG BIG smile on your face. Essential.