Love has been the benzine in pop music’s tank since time immemorial. That’s because trying to pin down its meaning is like trying to crescent kick a waterfall—it is constantly being filtered and refiltered through a pop culture prism. Everyone from Walt Disney, to Ian Curtis, to André 3000 had their own takes. Yet here we are, in 2016, and Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins has released a concept album about love that finds fresh angles.
The cover to The Healing Component features the heart as it beats in the human chest. The organ is exposed, precious, vital—only ever a beat away from the end of a life. Jenkins’ album arrives in the backdrop of the shooting death of Terence Crutcher at the hands of police in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Not to mention black men and children killed in Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge. The rapper might preach love throughout—“Spread love, try to combat the sadness,” he demands on the title track—but he sounds like an optimist desperately reaching for the broken shards tearing away from his soul. This might be one of year’s best blues albums.
Jenkins broadly pitches love as humanity’s “healing component” as taught to him through scripture. “That’s what Jesus was down here to show us,” he tells an anonymous friend on one of the record’s segues. Inevitably, a record this much into religion will be stacked next to fellow Chi-Town lyricist Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book. But while Chancelor’s record came with a wave of saintly Christian sentiment, Jenkins engages with faith as a weapon to scorch America’s white patriarchy.
“How could a black man not be confused in this?/Used to hang by those trees, we abusing them now?” Jenkins asks on “Strange Love,” a slam poetry scrapbook of scattered thoughts. He’s long used water as a metaphor for knowledge (see 2014 mixtape The Water[s], in particular) but on “Drowning,” it takes on a more sinister tone: “When the real hold you down, you supposed to drown right?/Wait, wait, that don’t sound right.” The death of Eric Garner haunts the track further with chants of “I can’t breathe” as BADBADNOTGOOD’s down ‘n’ dirty instrumentation sounds like a funeral procession. Police brutality, institutionalized racism, and the disrespectful pilfering of black culture are all covered in Jenkins’ pad of rhymes. This is protest rap whose punches come from odd angles but still land the with the weight of a sledgehammer.
The Healing Component is a verbose album, like it’s caught the emcee on a savage trip through the corridors of his mind. Jenkins might drop Bible references, but his scriptures have been dipped in enough drugs to take down Hunter S. Thompson. On the spaced-out “100 Xans,” he admits to “tweaking and laughing ‘til I hurt ribs.” The instrumentation, too, snaps with an acid-soaked psychedelia. “Strange Love” is all midnight-blue swagger, slinking forward with its cosmic keys and slide guitars. “Communicate,” produced by Kaytranada, is the closest thing the record has to a radio jam. It’s a head-down groove under the flickering strobe lights of a neon-tinted basement club after last orders—the only song where a line like, “Want to call you bae and I don’t mean San Francisco” could work.
Jenkins’ previous EP, the bouncy *Wave[s]**, *plays like the rapper burning off the lighter tracks in his chamber—the stuff that thematically falls outside this album’s concept. *The Healing Component *would have benefitted for a couple of those brighter moments to keep things moving, but it’s a small gripe. This socially-scathing, Alprazolam-laced, Jesus piece-baring work slices like a knife. He can’t successfully pin down the nuances of love over 62 minutes, but he spits plenty of good bars.
