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Album Cover via Mick Jenkins/Instagram


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Donna-Claire says ScHoolboy Q has a perfect rap voice.


There was something about Mick Jenkins ā€“ the ā€œdrink more waterā€ Mick Jenkins of the Chicago mixtape renaissance ā€“ that captivated my generation. I am a The Water[s] evangelist who, nine years earlier, thought Mick Jenkins entered my scope of reference at the height of his powers. I was younger, foolish. I had no idea an artist could really matureā€”thought every artist arrived fully formed on their breakout tape. But it hasnā€™t been 2014 in years, and while I still jam that essential tape from the sunset years of the blog era, I havenā€™t felt the rush of Mick Jenkinsā€™ unfettered passion in a majority of his follow-up releases.

Sure, Pieces of a Man and The Healing Component were presumably wizened, but there was something missing. I think Mick knew it, too. Well, I know he did, because the press surrounding this album features quotes centering Mick growing into himself in his 30s, feeling like this is the real first impression heā€™s happy with. As he told NPR, heā€™s pulling from ā€œthe soul of jazz,ā€ as he was on The Water[s], and that strikes me, too. I think of jazz as basically adult musician playtime. How I watch my best friend play repetitions of ā€œAutumn Leavesā€ and other standards on guitar, faster and faster, until he outpaces himself and has to stop and laugh. That feels like the spirit of jazz, that laughter. Itā€™s not that I needed Mick to be a jokester, itā€™s that past The Water[s], I couldnā€™t tell if he was having fun, if the concepts were coming from his gut. Things sounded belabored, as if Mick was performing Mick Jenkins, and not much else.

ā€œI was disgruntled in my situation for good reasons, and it affected my ability to do my best as an artist,ā€ Jenkins shared with NPR when asked if he feels freer now that heā€™s off Cinematic. ā€œYou know, I think as an artist, we create from an emotional place. Our connection to our art is emotional. A lot of the themes that I push and messages that Iā€™m trying to get across are bigger than me in my eyes. And being in a situation where Iā€™m uncomfortableā€”itā€™s going to affect how I create. And it did. And anything that I could lump in that category is no longer what Iā€™m dealing with. And it gives you a great breath of fresh air.ā€

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With The Patience, he opens things with a ferocious temple striking declaration of ā€œIā€™m hungry as hell.ā€ Itā€™s a nod to what was and a nod to what had to be invoked to become this new man. So Mick Jenkins is barking across the recordā€™s 27-minute runtime. He is playing his standards faster and faster, but heā€™s not slipping up and down the fretboard. Heā€™s fleet-footed and sharp. He is reaching an inflection point and then another, a rare trick where the pitch is released and somehow the ball can travel upwards in space across 11 solid songs. Heā€™s rapping like he has something to prove, but not to the listener, to himself. Heā€™s 32 years of age and, if I had to wager a guess, disgusted by the classification as a middle-class artistā€”an artist who bubbled up out of the underground but didnā€™t quite shatter into the upper echelon of mainstream success.

The Patience is a dexterous rap album from an artist who once elicited comparisons to Common and the concept of ā€œconscious rapā€ ā€“ an artist who somehow isnā€™t so far up his open third eye that we canā€™t see him when his voice crackles through productions. What Iā€™m trying to say is, Mick Jenkins stands tall, but humble.

The features are a feature unto themselves, how smartly Mick picks voices that complement his own, but never outshine him. This may be one of the most recent examples of sparring-matches-turned-draws that Iā€™ve heard in recent hip-hop. Itā€™s the spirit of jazz, again, the camaraderie and desire to push forward a modality of music. Heā€™s in ā€œX-Games modeā€¦ F*cked around and found a way.ā€ And the album proceeds in this direction, with Mick sparking up his self-awareness as combustible fuel. On ā€œ007,ā€ he refers to himself as holding the ultimate truth, which if youā€™ve heard The Water[s], you know was always part of the equation. But itā€™s subtler here. In his near-decade away from that tape, Mick has learned the value of getting smaller to get louder. He doesnā€™t shrink himself, but he does condense to make for a more potent explosion of energy.

The acrobatic and creeping ā€œShow & Tellā€ with Freddie Gibbs is the mission state of the album: ā€œI had to show n****s / Wasnā€™t even tryinā€™ to outgrow n****s.ā€ The rest of the first verse follows this pattern of Mick addressing himself and his role in The Rap Gameā€”if there even is such a thing, with the death of monoculture and all, which is also maybe the point of this verse?ā€”positioning himself as a young veteran who couldnā€™t tell resting laurels from a kicked can of paint. And, okay, itā€™s just nice to hear a rapper care at this stage of their career. The thirst for innovation is the greatest driver of The Patience. And Iā€™m not even sour all those albums came before itā€”and neither is Mick, I would guessā€”because you have to have the indignant cough before the moving monologue.

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It took me a while to succumb to streaming. I had an iPod I took everywhere until the dog days of summer in 2018, when I was forced to decide: am I deleting my favorite mixtapes in order to try out new music, or am I holding on to those precious storage blocks? Begrudgingly, I made a Spotify account in my old Pitman, NJ apartment, where my desk was in the living room, nestled between the packed CD rack and coffee table. I bring up this detail to make a point, of course, that I was a physical media lifer, and to this day, between shooting film and decrying Kindles, I prefer the texture of something real. And, as you might expect, Mick Jenkins was part of that formative shaping of sniffing out the real from the fake.

The Water[s] made me feel smart. The Patience makes me nod along knowingly. I bet Mick felt like a genius sent by God when he dropped his 2014 tape, and I bet lifeā€”as life is wont to doā€”unfolded and reminded him, as it did to me from 2014 to now, that we donā€™t know anything at all. The Patience is the byproduct of waiting and grinding it out, of learning and yearning to achieve something greater than being a blog era wonder, or a ā€œconscious rapperā€ relegated to The Underachiever years of the internet. This album is a testament to not sitting still, to meeting life on lifeā€™s terms and taking it for a ride. It is a dazzling album, one of the strongest of the year, but more importantly, it should serve as a reminder to all creatives everywhere: get uncomfortable on your terms, settle into something new, and make your best art.


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