Growing up
is a hard and unrewarding endeavor. It is a process that reveals more to you
about the world and yourself without dispatching any real understanding of
either or conveying real power to change them. If you are lucky, you can discover as you age something about yourself that you love, some activity that you are passionate
about, and which allows you to connect with others and share a gift bore of
your own sweat, blood, and gray matter. Most people aren't so lucky, though.
Chicago hip hop and experimental artist Nnamdi Ogbonnaya aka NNAMDÏ is
sensitive to the pains of growing up and the conflict that this process brings
into focus within your vision of yourself and the possibilities presented to
you as a person. Learning to embrace a willful manifestation of the self if
really the only way that some can navigate and survive the world, and it is
inspiring to see NNAMDÏ explode out of the Malort icing Birthday cake that is Chicago's
underground to sing lovely songs of self-acceptance and actualization to
us on his latest album BRAT. Things kick off wonderfully with the acoustically
anchored and orchestrally oriented, brash-bash pop "Flowers for my
Demons," a track that seamlessly transitions into the phat and righteously
ugly, bad-bass, cash-stacking, heart-breaking sob-fest "Gimme Gimme."
Getting what you need to live and pursuing your goals with the fervor required
to fulfill them can feel selfish and even painful for an empathic person. This
is a reality examined in-depth on the claustrophobic, spastic, padded-walled
aperture "Bullseye" which contains the line, "I'm a big ole brat
and you laugh when I say that I need all that," a sentence that mimics and
mocks detractors whose criticisms are more oriented towards themselves than an understanding of your actual needs, contrasted with the tracks creep progression into more
confident and mature orchestrations. A beautiful dynamic rebuttal that plays itself out again and again through the record's run time. If you can't fuck with soft-focus, indie
jazz-rap, and dream-scape soul-devotional "Everyone I Love" or the mathy,
post-rock flush of "Perfect in My Mind" then I'm not even sure why
your reading this or if you can consider yourself a hip hop fan following the emergence of BRAT into the world. NNAMDÏ has thrown down a game-changer here,
and I hope it inspires you to love yourself a little more and make some changes
in your life that allows you to be there fully for yourself and others.
