The cover of R.A.P. Ferreira’s 10th album depicts a vintage car parked on the shore of a psychedelic stream. People, perhaps the owners of the vehicle, float face-up in the water as if taking a break, but the car looks ready to move along. Its headlights beam into the borders of the image as if seeking the unknown. That mix of repose and anticipation captures the spirit of 5 to the Eye With Stars, where Ferreira takes stock of his journey while plotting its next leg. The record doesn’t stray from Ferreira’s core sound of jazzy boom bap, but his candid writing brings out the lucidity and urgency of his music.He’s always been a stargazer and maverick prone to obfuscation and evasion. “Yo milo, why you always rap in passcodes?” he asked himself on 2015’s so the flies don’t come. The answer: “’Cause they assholes/Who don’t deserve the whole.” He still shuns legibility, but since 2021’s Bob’s Son, his album-length ode to beat poet Bob Kaufman, he has prioritized finding himself rather than eluding the listener. Arcane allusions to pop culture and continental philosophy have decreased, supplanted by autobiography and pointed interactions with his surroundings. “Negro, I’m on the World Wide Web/Slandering Eugene V. Debs, and I’m having fun with it/My mindset is on an abundance/These muhfuckas is Wakanda pundits,” he raps on “boot knife.” Even his flexes foreground his pleasure and curiosity.
Ferreira does a lot of shit-talking and stunting on this record. Opener “fighting back” sets the tone with rhymes about making his first million off cassette sales and powering the cosmos with epic poetry. On “ark doors,” he hits the electric slide while holding his scrotum in Cashville (Nashville), where he relocated after a stint helming a record store in Biddeford, Maine. Single “ours” finds him colonizing the stars and dunking like Kareem Abdul-Jabar over a jingly Rose Noir beat. The production feels muted compared to the rutted beats on Purple Moonlight Pages and Bob’s Son, where the textures brought out the swing in Ferreira’s loping cadences, but his boosted confidence emboldens him. His lines land like blows.That sense of weight extends to his frequent soul-searching, which ballasts his boasts. “This chapter of my life is called almost,” he says on “fighting back.” On “consolation,” a track inspired by the poem “Butter Sunday,” he offers a Pyrrhic victory chant. “Well fed, my consolation,” he murmurs for the hook, embracing his minor success as an indie rap act while acknowledging its meager rewards. Ferreira has always paired the poetic with the prosaic, but here there’s no whiplash or provocation. He simply unspools, “a being, being honest,” as he puts it on “ours.”
On the elegiac “mythsysizer instinct,” which features one of the neatest hooks in his catalog, he pivots from plaintive disclosures (“There are days I only get to see my son on FaceTime”) to imagistic couplets (“Stained white Ts, Delilah delights me/Ronda Rousey type beat”) while building to a haymaker in the second verse. “You know, rappin’ get people killed,” he raps, the deliberate pause underscoring the gravity of the statement. He neither editorializes nor mythologizes. He just observes, and steadies his pen for whatever comes next.
Earlier this year, Ferreira tweeted that he no longer found “the idea of genre useful,” and that he is “operating in a Black cultural, historical tradition spanning many vocal techniques, instruments, forms, electricities.” In September, he followed that announcement with an EP of scrappy blues songs under the name Crow Billiken. 5 to the Eye With Stars is a more conventional and accomplished set, but it’s just as interested in evolution. In its most inspired and unmoored moments, even doubt feels clarifying.
