Chris Crack is one of those auteur-style rappers who couldn't march to anyone's beat other than his own. Not even if he tired. Not even if you tried to force him. Not even if you swapped his heart out with a pacemaker with a metronome in it. No, not even if you drafted him into the army and made him do drills in the rain to Kanye's 808 and Heartbreaks. Not even if you put him on Adderall (which I'm sure he could probably get himself if he wanted to).
Like JPEGMafia his contemporaries Earl Sweatshirt, he does what he wants, when he wants, with the attitude it requires to carry the project to term. Whether that requires steaming a hook in the pressure cooker of his brain for 9 months before dropping it into the cut or unleashing a flash edit of lip-chewing, RnB wh a title like "Creampies Are Consensual," he's going to do what the moment requires to fulfill his artistic vision.
Emblematic of Chris's indomitable, and downright damnable, determination is the prolific nature of the Chicago rapper's output. Chris generally puts out about four LPs a year (even prior to the pandemic) and is well on his way to keeping this pace in 2021. I'm just getting caught up on his material now, and while I haven't heard his latest album Sheep Hate Goats, I'm thoroughly enjoying his album from earlier this year, MIGHT DELETE LATER.
MDL is pretty typical of Chris's output at this point, which frankly, is a good thing. The album is packed in tight with obscure soul and funk rips that give his beats a solid and classic hip-hop foundation on which to build, life-like replicas of Chicago streets and private homes, where tales of anguish, depression, and redemption play out as cripplingly real fantasies in the form of dark comedies and elated tragedies. The album starts by dropping you into the stream of a self-interrogating train of thought with "If She Ain't 280 She Ain't a Lady," which begins on point with a non-sequitur skit of sorts before Chris slips in with a daring flow that lobs darts at a self-portrait over a lonesome horn sample. From there, things relax a bit with the soft, beachy soul guitar sampling "Jesus Dropped the Charges" which features Nate Know coasting on a calm and naturally reflective flow.
If you've come for Chris's nearly tuneless but epizooticly confident singing, the blurry and sober, submerged piano pinned, and blue-groove grate of "Ghetto Until Proven Fashionable" as well as the time disrupting, city lights glow-bath of "Grow Privately" should keep your boat afloat. My favorite moments, though, are when Chris's approach becomes the most caustic, like on the blemished and shame-scared "Raw Sex as Friends" or the bitterly forceful "Raw Sex as Friends," where Chris sounds like an unwashed preacher outside a Target somewhere downtown, yelling at you about the parallels of fornication. Then there is the grimy and ghoulish, Danny Brown-esque "Kaiser Permanente" and the West-Coast, smoke-shop jam "Keisha Cole Slaw" with its oddly incisive, bubble-blowing flow in the interlude courtesy of Mr. Muthafuckin Exquire.
It can be a little hard to tell when Chris is letting you in on the joke of some of these tracks, but not knowing is its own kind of fun as well. Get on this one now! Because as the title implies, once Chis has a chance to take a look at this one with the benefit of some daylight, a shower, and a strong cup of coffee, it might get purged it from his timeline.
