Maassai loves jazz. It comes through in the amber-toned, free-flowing production that unfurls leisurely throughout her music, leaving ample room for her dense lyrics. When rappers like Earl Sweatshirt and Mavi write similarly philosophical raps, their delivery generally matches the dreaminess of the production. Maassai’s voice carries an unrelenting urgency and clarity that allows her to relay complex ideas with stunning efficiency. Her poetry is creative and immediate, teeming with wisdom and raw emotion in equal measure.
Producer and collaborator JWords has said Maassai always chooses to rap over the most adventurous beats, and that spirit of experimentation defines her recent work. In addition to releasing three EPs in the past two years, Maassai has collaborated with like-minded rappers including Mavi and Pink Siifu, bringing complex, polished wordplay to their glimmering, soul-sampling production. Last year, she and JWords released ve·loc·i·ty, an eclectic, vivacious rap and dance music collaboration. Her latest album, With the Shifts, is another remarkably compact avant-garde rap offering. It burns and blossoms, encompassing, in just over 17 minutes, the pain, pleasure, and lucidity of journeying inwards.
Album closer “to no end” is a prime example. It’s only 28 seconds long, but combing over its 16 lines will leave the mind and the pulse racing. As Maassai simultaneously articulates her desire and celebrates her strength, her words weave around a prickly drum beat. The last six words of the final verse are delivered with unwavering confidence and precision: “Everything they never pictured/Watch when I frame it different.”
At its core, this album documents Maassai’s resilience. The searing imagery of opener “Next Chapter” relays her struggle not to get buried in the heaviness of her childhood. “Born to break the cycle for whoever’s after me/Started channeling my rage/I knew I didn’t have to be a product of my pain,” she raps, acknowledging her hurt while also making space to grow around and beyond it. “Nine Lives” is an affirmation that celebrates rebirth and grace in the face of hate. “We all been enslaved to our traumas/You brave if you honest with yourself,” she says, showing the work that goes into this spiritual growth.
She contextualizes her emotional journey in a broader framework of intergenerational Black liberation. Her healing is for herself but also the people who come after her, and for the people who are listening now. On “Grace Jones,” she looks to the iconic, gender-bending and genre-defying artist as inspiration to “redefine the model.” Maassai questions a world where people posing as radical get credit without doing much work while “We innately magical/And they hate to see it/And we hate the status quo.” Speaking in the second person, she encourages the listener to treat the fire in their soul as sacred, to not lose their faith in themselves.
With the Shifts defies easy categorization. Every time it feels like you’ve understood the emotional trajectory of a song, Maassai shifts direction, never allowing any one sentiment or sound to define her for long. She describes herself as having flames on her tongue, and her words blaze across the dusty, sun-faded production. It’s not easy to weave together such conflicting emotional states, to access the pain in her past while celebrating more recent triumphs, but Maassai’s understanding of self is vast and complex enough to hold it all. She also keeps one eye looking ahead: “Saving up all of my magic/Can’t imagine what I’m about to be/All of my aims is up in the sky,” she says on “to fly.” The tough combined work of remaking the self and remaking the system pays off in this idyllic future she generously allows us to preview with her.
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