For his excellent new album, Elephant in the Room, the Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins decided to get personal. Not that he’s ever been surface-level — his previous work delved into personal challenges with stress, anxiety and the problems with notoriety — but here, he’s focused on how his external relationships have changed and needs help dealing with it all. “From my estranged relationship with my father to friendships that don’t feel the same anymore,” Jenkins said in a press release. Elephant finds Jenkins walking head-on into problems he’s long ignored “in the hopes that others can identify with the spaces I’ve grown from.” Take the opening track, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” as an example: Over an energetic backing track, he eschews the urge to keep pace with his competition. Instead, after realizing that some of his peers may have greater name recognition, he understands that the only rival is himself. With each feature and album, Jenkins wants to get better — for himself.
I don’t think we bring up Jenkins enough when discussing noted artists in hip-hop. Born in Huntsville, Alabama and raised in Chicago, he grew up listening to neo-soul and gospel. At 17, he started going to open mic showcases at Young Chicago Authors, the same group that nurtured the likes of the singer Jamila Woods and the rapper Noname. Over the past five years, he’s released a handful of impressive projects, which all exhibited his dedication to old acoustic soul and Black liberation jazz.
One could sense the influence of The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron; on his 2018 album, Pieces of a Man, in particular, he leaned heavily into spoken-word, even mixing tracks like “Heron Flow” and “Smoking Song” to sound like Afrocentric spiritual jazz from a bygone era. Conversely, Elephant in the Room feels more modern, even if the tracks “Scottie Pippen” and “Rug Burn” suggest his commitment to nostalgic soul is still there. Basketball fans might LOL at the former; over a slow-burning instrumental, Jenkins ribs the Chicago Bulls legend, equating his inability to win the NBA Finals without Michael Jordan to his own helplessness without a partner. “I was trippin’,” he sings. “No matter how well I shoot I’ll never win it all on my own.” Surely it’s a sneak-diss to Pippen, but when unpacked here, it’s a superb tune about checking one’s ego within romantic and platonic connections.
Yet the album isn’t completely inward-looking. “Things You Could Die For If Doing While Black” is a sobering take on the uncertainty of Black existence, rapped from the perspective of a man who merely wants to live. “I just wanna smoke my weed,” he groans through a dejected temperament. “I just wanna love my girl.” But that’s not all: “I just wanna praise my God, I just wanna sell my loose cigarettes. I just wanna do my job, might wanna go for a jog. Might wanna sleep in my car, might wanna sleep in my bed.” Jenkins taps into the racial reckoning of 2020, when the killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd spurred worldwide protests and found the U.S. split along ideological divides. By running through all the things that Black people can’t do freely, Jenkins reminds us that societal issues still persist, even if they’ve receded from view. In his world, that’s another problem hiding in plain sight that we can’t stand to ignore.
