Elephant In the Room - Mick Jenkins [REVIEW!!!]
favorite tracks: Truffles, Reflection, Things You Could Die For if Doing While Black
Fans listen to Mick Jenkins for his clever wordplay, open discussion of modern societal issues, and the relaxing atmosphere of his flow and the beats he raps on. He came with exactly those things plus some introspection on his most recent album, Elephant in the Room.
His 2018 album Pieces of a Man was all about looking at pieces of a person—their race, mental state, experiences, etc.—and not judging them by just one piece. He focused on the people around him and current social issues and trends. Elephant in the Room can be thought of as the inverse of that. Mick Jenkins writes straight from his own experiences and the listener is free to relate to it. He’s addressing things that he initially wasn’t so eager to think about and reflect on...pretty much just the many elephants in the room.
Ever since he was a kid, Mick had been a close observer of the people and places around him. He frequently rode the train and would watch the different types of people getting on and off at different stops. Throughout the course of his train rides and people-watching, the major ethnic and racial differences and disparities across the neighborhoods of Chicago became very glaring to him. When he joined Young Chicago Writers, an organization dedicated to helping youths’ self-expression through writing, he was encouraged even more to observe and learn about the things around him. There he just wrote poems but he transferred that skill to rapping when he got to college. These things gave him insight to talk so much about race in his later songs.
“The Valley of the Shadow of Death” is an introduction to the album. He mentions some of its themes through lines like “some of us struggling to find inner peace” that he expands on in later songs. He ends the first verse strongly with “they give a f*ck if you fly, we supposed to fly or sell dope / we supposed to give them the keys so they can get the door / still had to kick in the door to get in the door / he was five and we gon’ call the boy a thug for the rest of his life.”
Even though it’s a recurring topic in his music, Mick has barely ever directly addressed the fear that he experiences with racism. But in his song “Carefree” from his 2020 EP The Circus, he says he wishes he could live a normal life where he doesn’t have to take his skin color into consideration before doing things that everyone should be able to do in peace. He says, “damn, nigga, let me breathe / damn, nigga, let me cook,” referring to the “BBQ Becky” incident of 2018 and the countless amount of cases of black people who have been hurt by the police.
This song works as a preface to the album and “Carefree” also happens to be the password to enter Mick’s custom webpage for Elephant in the Room. But it’s also the beginning of him being vulnerable about the topic of race. He’s pointed out many different ways that racism exists in his music, but he hadn’t really expressed his own personal emotions about it. So when his objectives of opening up about himself and talking about race come together, we get the second song off the album “Things You Could Die For If Doing While Black.” It’s about the anxiety that comes with trying to enjoy your life as a black American. The entire song is a list of things Mick wants to do without worrying: “I just wanna speak my mind,” “I just wanna make mistakes,” “might wanna sleep in my car,” are just a few, and the bridge being him repeating, “I just wanna live my life” clearly reflect sadness and show a sort of vulnerability about racism he hasn’t really shown before.
The theme of vulnerability and being honest with himself carries into the third song, “Stiff Arm.” A lot of people don’t like to openly admit that they’ve grown out of a longtime friendship so Mick bluntly does that here. “Fact is some niggas just weeds / Fact is some niggas gon’ grow / Fact is some you don’t need.”
Mick shows his talent for clever wordplay in “Contacts,” a song about him refusing to succumb to the practices of get-money-quick mainstream rap. Just one example is “sh*t hit different, I need scissors now, cutting ties,” shouting out SZA’s hit song “Hit Different” by pronouncing “scissors” like “SZA’s.”
In “D.U.I.,” Mick talks about how he doesn't want to be an influencer or celebrity. He’s made random comments before telling his fans to not call him famous, and in this song he reveals it’s because he doesn’t like the authority that comes with fame. Mick Jenkins may not be too mainstream but most people who consume a lot of hip hop have at least heard his name, and he’s very relevant in the Chicago hip hop scene. In the chorus of the song he asks the listener “who you follow, who you leading,” followed by him singing “trust me” in a coercing tone from the perspective of the common influencer. At the end of the song he asks a good question about celebrity culture: “why niggas who don’t know me in my face sayin’ they love me?”
Even though Mick only directly mentions his dad in a few lines, it’s clear the overarching topic of “Reflection” is his father. He says he and his dad don’t talk much, when they do talk it’s just about sports, and that his dad used to make him feel small. But he also says that he hopes eventually the “cold shoulders” him and his dad have towards each other will thaw. We get the idea that his dad wasn’t around often and that he and Mick have mostly lost touch. The song is called reflection because Mick is making the point that a lot of men experience parental trauma that they don’t ever resolve, so when they’re forced to reflect—”put a mirror in a nigga face and he’ll run”—they don’t know how to cope or handle those feelings in a healthy way. He reflects and understands himself through rapping: “if it wasn’t for rap / This shit a mirror or sorts, got me seeing myself.” There’s also a different meaning to this song where he’s saying people fear being a reflection of their bad parents.
No matter which song you’re dissecting on this album, it’ll a fun little puzzle because Mick Jenkins is truly a poet. All hip hop is poetry, but because of his poetic background, he has a thing for clever wordplay, double meanings, and metaphors that’s very unique to him, and that’s what makes this album so replayable—the fact that everytime you listen to one of these songs there’s a chance you’ll notice something new. But the laid back feeling of his songs also give you the option to not think and just enjoy the sound on its own.
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