Kodak Black stands accused of sexual assault. It’s an inconvenient truth, but it’s the lens he invites when he releases a so-called R&B album on Valentine’s Day. Over the course of 17 tracks, the Florida rapper grants entry into his troubled affairs with women through a combination of crooned love letters and woeful screeds. But with an open case for sexual assault lingering (he’s currently locked up on unrelated charges), Heart Break Kodak feels like a witless, noxious provocation.
Throughout the mixtape, the streets and unnamed lovers wage a war for Kodak’s heart. Strained relationships and conflicting interests are a theme as universal as music itself, and fans will likely delight in hearing him croon about letting go as he does on sing-song opener “Running Outta Love.” Much of his appeal comes from his diaristic lyrics and his depiction of a broken system’s impact on his life. Investment in this narrative makes it hard to separate what the world has done to him and what he’s done to the world in the wake of his fame. On the melancholic “I Get Lonely,” for example, he positions himself as a victim of the state, deploying lines like, “I don't be tryna be violent, life could be much greater/But they wanna see me in prison, wanna see me on them papers.” Fans of Kodak love him for this. It’s as if the story he has to tell and the skill with which he tells it eclipses any of his real-life transgressions.
Legendary author, filmmaker, and all-around hip-hop historian Nelson George summarized this very issue in an essay on the genre’s delicate relationship between fans, authenticity, and censorship published in his 1998 book Hip Hop America: “They see everything as a plot by white people to destroy black men when, the truth is, some of these brothers have seriously fucked up and deserve both the censure from our community and jail time.” George, coincidentally, was writing about another of South Florida's native sons: Uncle Luke who, in light of the Parkland school shooting, took to Twitter to paint a picture of how black men are treated compared to their white counterparts, using Kodak as an example. Both points are true: Crime does happen, but politicians and law enforcement also salivate at a chance to lock up these men. There continues to be an attack on rappers and black men in general (see: Meek Mill), but it’s equally true that those same folks have also done irreversible harm to others—especially women.
Lovers of hip-hop extend a certain amount of creative license to rappers and the graphic content in their lyrics. Plenty has been afforded to Kodak since his breakout single “No Flockin’.” After all, there is a context and a functional (though misguided) purpose to intra-community gun violence and selling drugs. These actions are often the result of societal failings trickling down into personal ones, and regardless, everything in the verse isn’t and shouldn’t be taken as gospel truth. But sexual assault is a different kind of social ill. Certainly, misogyny and patriarchal violence are built into American culture and Heart Break Kodak is a product of both. But when attitudes become allegations, what some refer to as “calling in” must become calling out.
The piano-laden “Hate Being Alone” is Kodak’s best attempt at courtship here, and it still rings hollow. While he makes it through the song without undermining his own intent—no bitches or hoes, only bae—no amount of charm can make even his “sweetest” moments appealing. It’s hard not to think of his alleged victim, of the woman from his Instagram Live, of him slapping a stripper’s ass unprompted (and getting kicked off stage for it), of his disdain for dark-skinned women. This isn’t someone who has made a convincing case for deserving anyone’s company. The version of love or lust displayed on Heart Break Kodak is one-dimensional and, more often than not, it’s selfish. The expectation that his partner should put up with his laundry list of ongoing trials and tribulations lingers in every corner, and when she chooses otherwise, she has somehow failed him and, as he claims on “Loyal,” made him heartless.
Though he seems apologetic at times—particularly when he’s offering amends to his mother on the sincere “Corrupted”—his relationship to women remains, at best, complicated and, at worst, altogether toxic. As Elizabeth Méndez Berry wrote in her 2005 Vibe essay “Love Hurts”: “When you get paid big money to call every woman a ho, at what point do you start believing you're a pimp?” It’s not that rap should close itself off from the R&B musings of those who have questionable dealings with women. Future’s HNDRXX, Young Thug’s Beautiful Thugger Girls or Chief Keef’s Thot Breaker, all from last year, deserve every bit of the praise they were offered. It may even be important and necessary that rappers embark on this frontier of balancing their tough-guy personas with matters of the heart. But whatever artistic merits Heart Break Kodak may have, they are sullied by these allegations.
It’s been five years since Rocko’s “U.O.E.N.O.”—a single that featured Rick Ross’ infamous “molly all in her champagne” date-rape lyric. The line spurred one of the first times in recent memory that discussions about rap and rape culture converged in the public discourse on such a grand scale. Ultimately, apologies were doled out, but little has changed since then. Artists get a slap on their hand while their transgressions hover over their music, following them but never falling on them. Record labels keep supporting them and media outlets like this one continue to cover them. It says something about whose trauma takes precedence, whose stories are worth telling, and which survivors are worthy of not having their abuser given a platform. How, after all, does one engage the conversation without also indirectly aiding the bottom line? Hate streaming—whether toward him or his critics—still counts.
Which brings us back to Heart Break Kodak. At this stage, there's nothing salvageable about it when the only maybe-acknowledgment of the pending charges is a now-deleted line from last year’s single “Tunnel Vision” where he claims, “I get any girl I want, I ain't gotta rape.” (The line now goes, “I get any girl I want, any girl I want.”) The entire fiasco is a shame, really. For someone who’s self-aware enough to rap something like, “Jumped up out the womb like my daddy the devil/My son jumped up out the womb like his daddy the devil” from a prison phone on “When Vultures Cry,” it seems he would rather let arrogance derail him. Even with this take on an “R&B” album, his fans aren’t going anywhere, and that’s their choice. But ultimately, Kodak won’t be redeemed by his romance any more than he can be saved by apathy.
