Chicago has undergone a creative renaissance in the past few years, one of a depth few anticipated. Compared with earlier regional moments, where local buzz propelled a handful of artists to the national stage, the Internet’s clear-glass window into this world—and the increased marketing savvy of even its least-established teenagers—has made the city’s multiple scenes appear saturated. This is further exaggerated by the reams of imitators the city’s bigger stars—Chief Keef and Chance the Rapper—have inspired. With limited oxygen in a competitive space, a raft of rookie artists have stubbornly hoisted themselves into the air, grasping for whichever angle best fits.
With the release of The Water[s] earlier this month, 6'5" Alabama-born, Chicago-raised rapper Mick Jenkins towers above most of the city’s newcomers, literally and figuratively. Like collaborators Chance the Rapper, Saba, and Noname Gypsy, he’s a product of Chicago’s vibrant poetry scene, and a sharp disciple of a similar lyrical tradition. Jenkins is a conscientious person, a writer drawn to literary symbolism, punctuating the poetic obliqueness of his bars with barbed truths. His debut, 2013’s jazzy Trees & Truths, was loose and indistinct. The improved songcraft of The Water[s] tightens his focus, yet each track feels of a piece, its cohesive sound reflective of the album's titular metaphor.
This mixtape does bear an evident debt to Kendrick Lamar, and at times, The Water[s] feels like an album-length tribute to Kendrick’s “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” and “Swimming Pools (Drank).” Although the first few songs take on amorphous shape of album tracks, Jenkins’ very first verse grounds them in “The Art of Peer Pressure”–like action and movement: “It was 91st and Laney, we were six deep, steppin’ up the stairs/Black Buick with a slick creep, moving down the block, we had froze/Felt the tension in my toes….” But Mick Jenkins’ bold delivery is nothing like Lamar’s introverted one. Even when Jenkins’ poetical hand gets a bit too free with the pen, his verses are drawn together by the unbroken stride of his words. He stands apart thanks to a rap style that gives muscle to a moral position.
As Guru once said, it’s mostly the voice: deep and sonorous, Jenkins’ vocals resonate with a particularly masculine brand of authority. Where Chance the Rapper’s voice affects a manic, elastic character, or Vic Mensa aims for empathic transcendence, Mick Jenkins is practical, decisive, and no-nonsense. Uninterested in high-minded frivolities, he often sounds like he’s getting to the point, even when he isn’t: “Everybody wanna be the back of a D-Rose” is a bit of coded language (Derrick Rose’s jersey has the number one on the back), but his delivery still gives this wordplay pointed gravitas. Serious and dignified, he wears his voice like a Sunday suit.
This confident rhetorical style is underpinned by the anxiety of a person who perceives that the world has issued him a false bill of sale. Clear-eyed, he recognizes the superficiality of his peers’ wealth and status obsessions and the counterfeit choices the world has presented them. For Mick Jenkins, “water” represents spiritual nourishment, clarity, purpose, qualities essential to life yet too easily ignored by the distracted. This isn’t just standard young adult nonconformism—although it is that, too—but, in the context of Chicago’s South Side, where “Little niggas got guns now/And they carry them to the fuckin’ beat,” a matter of life and death. Mick Jenkins combats this anxious frustration with aggressive confidence, willing his truth to reshape a warped reality.
The album’s best songs foreground his words. The sparse, unsettling “Jazz,” which twists with terse ambiguity, lets his vocals take center stage. Statik Selektah’s “Black Sheep” gives the back half some sleek momentum, while the frenetic “Who Else” upends the casual atmosphere with some of Jenkins’ most focused writing. But The Water[s] peaks with the climactic DJ Dahi–produced urgency of “Dehydration,” where each word seems underlined for maximum dramatic impact. Closer “Jerome,” with Joey Bada$$—the album’s most atypical track—feels like an exuberant Lost Boyz tribute, and a welcome exultation after a record of stern intensity.
In sharp contrast with Mick Jenkins’ brolic tone, the album’s leisurely production is soothingly therapeutic, all smudged-graphite edges. Where his first album was jazzy in a general sense, The Water[s]’ languid guitar lines and airy atmosphere bathe the music in soft-focus blues and greens, a watercolor that recalls the placid cool of ’60s modal jazz. The connection between aggression and relaxation is essential: His vocals keep the chilled production dynamic, while the reassuring ambiance is immersive, sanding the rough edges on occasionally weighty material.
Heaviest of all is “Martyrs,” released as a video at the end of last year. The visuals include a flashed simulacrum of Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like” video, but with Jenkins and each dreadlocked extra wearing a noose. The beat, like Kanye’s “Blood on the Leaves,” co-opts a conceptually loaded sample in Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” His lyrics attack youthful hypocrisy and conformity, the empty pursuit of money and sex, and his peers’ susceptibility to these traps. This is his truth, and a welcome counter to the blithe attitude many rap fans have carried over the last two decades of violence in the form. All the same, as Mick Jenkins grows in stature, he may experience the sensation of having people agree for the wrong reasons; that his words, as potent as they are, could easily be co-opted by those who would demonize teenagers for their own oppression—a mirrored experience of what may have gone through Keef’s mind the first time he saw a crowd of white fans rap the hook to “I Don’t Like.” One’s eyes can never be too open, but at least we can trust Mick Jenkins to tell us how he sees it.
