The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development finally demolished the last building of the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s South Side in 2007, but by then, the more than 11,000 people that formerly occupied its 28 buildings had long been written off. After a 1969 shift in public housing policy that made rent commensurate with one’s income, working-class families were replaced with new tenants on public assistance paying nearly nothing. As operating income plummeted, resources became scarce, tenant screening almost non-existent, and crime ubiquitous. HUD’s solution, the HOPE VI program, dealt with the project buildings the same way HUD dealt with black bodies—discarding them when they become inconvenient, marking the Robert Taylor Homes for demolition and redevelopment. For Michael Eagle II, who had grown up in the community and whose aunt was displaced by the demolition, the metaphor was not subtle. And neither is the cover of his new album as Open Mike Eagle, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream.
The record lives quietly in the daydreams of a kid in the Robert Taylor Homes, the life of a child with an active imagination in a hardened environment often actively hostile toward creativity. Tonally, it evokes Tupac Shakur’s posthumous collection of poetry, The Rose That Grew From Concrete, and the rich history of art born from black pain. It’s a colorful portrait of lives that are typically rendered in one dimension. And yet somehow, he can still make us laugh.
Eagle is a late-30s indie rapper on his fifth solo LP, no small feat in and of itself. A graduate of LA’s Project Blowed collective, he’s carved out his own lane with a successful podcast and a live show that’s since been optioned as a program on Comedy Central. He’s long been an advocate for the wealth of diversity in the black experience in hip-hop, wielding the morose truth-telling aesthetic of stand-up comedy to bring levity to the often tragic circumstances of his social commentary.
Brick Body Kids Still Daydream serves as an antidote to dystopian depictions of the neighborhoods and communities on Chicago’s South Side that are often one-dimensional, serving as a glimpse into the mind of a poet who can see the beauty and articulate it through the eyes of a child. It’s a very specific brand of ’90s nostalgia—wistful remembrance of a life he left behind, one that inexorably shaped him.
Impressively, Eagle maintains a coherent aesthetic across 12 tracks by ten different producers, a muted brood that resists the default loudness of mainstream hip-pop. There’s a lushness to the production absent some of his earlier work, but he’s still comfortable pulling sounds from anywhere: guitars and wind instruments, analog synthesizers, or distorted vocal samples. His voice is soulful and reserved, and his sing-raps are smooth.
Eagle’s strength is as a writer, and Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is chock full of witty one-liners (“Been woke so long I might need to take a nap,” he raps on “TLDR (Smithing)”). But unlike actual comedians, he doesn’t seem too invested in lingering on the punch lines. His flow is slow but always nimble, packing verses with complicated rhyme schemes while maintaining crystal clear diction. He has the writer’s gift for detail, the ability to articulate ephemeral concepts rooted in nostalgia. On “(How Could Anybody) Feel At Home,” he raps: “I’m avoiding my nose/It smells like you should imagine you boiled a rose/And the oven is on/And the coil’s exposed.” He mints poignant aphorisms with ease (“An apple a day/What apple sellers say”) and as he dabbles in casual misandry (“If there was justice all men would have to die/Patricide/Tweet at the void and heart the at replies”) it’s as if you can see the smirk on his face that hides all the pain.
At the heart of the album’s concept is the “Legendary Iron Hood,” a too-smart-for-his-own-good ghetto child who’s been trampled underfoot by life. He’s become an expert at keeping his head down, his hood a protective shroud from the dangers that surround him. On “No Selling,” we see him force himself to play it cool amid the chaos, remaining steely in the face of pain and fear. The LP’s centerpiece, “Brick Body Complex,” is about as forceful as Eagle gets, promising “I will never fit in your descriptions/I’m giant/Don’t let nobody tell you nothing different/They lying/A giant and my body is a building.” The projects are more than just a collection of buildings at this point; they’re tied up in his identity, even his physical self. The bricks are his armor.
If “Brick Body Complex” is the LP’s centerpiece, then “My Auntie’s Building” is its coda. Swirling static and dissonant noise seethe over boom-bap drums as he begs some higher power not to knock him down, bitter that the destruction seems only to find bodies that look like his: “They say America fights fair/But they won't demolish your timeshare.” And as he repeats the record’s final line—“That’s the sound of them tearing my body down”—the distorted sounds of demolition rumble in the background.
On a recent flight, Eagle was transfixed by a pair of documentaries on his auntie’s projects, and moved to write something about the place where much of his youth played out. In this way, a strange parallel can be found with Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra, who wrote about the since-demolished Bronx high-rise of her youth on The Navigator’s “Fourteen Floors,” exploring the existential limbo of returning home, only to be unable to recognize it. But as much as demolition of the Robert Taylor Homes altered the landscape of Chicago’s South Side, it’s hard to say that much has changed. The violence that plagued the project still plagues the community, and ghetto children still dream of iron hoods with their heads in the clouds, and Open Mike Eagle builds a small monument where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood.
