He does this often: a funny voice that’s just a funny voice, a line that’s just clever and nothing else. On “HOOPTI” he calls back to his single “Netflix & Dusse” and raps his idea of a perfect night: “Chicken strips and scary movies-romance.” At one point, on the throbbing R&B track “Z4L,” Smino snowballs into an all-out Bugs Bunny impression and ends up saying, “Check my color palette/White just like a bunny wabbit,” without breaking the mood, but also without making a point. He’s also downright hilarious and endlessly sassy. On another he rhymes “Shibuya” with “she boo, yeah” and “see-through dress.” The production is so warm and soft and despite all the maneuvers, Smino is so understated that it sometimes sounds like he’s whisper singing brags under a velvet blanket.įor the most part, NOIR is a raunchy bedroom party album where Smino would rather put a wet towel under the hotel bathroom door than be stuck in the club. On the same song he makes “real freaky” sound like “Rafiki” to force a Lion King reference and accomplish nothing else. Smino never explains or calls attention to them but these moments are everywhere on NOIR sometimes to the point of bogging things down with cleverness. Listen to Smino rap it once and you’ll never revert back from the upswing at the end of “10 puppies” so that it somehow rhymes with “Japanese” or the way he makes a four-syllable utterance of “champagne” feel like a graceful pirouette. “I'm flee like 10 puppies/These Japanese/I don't drink champagne/But fuck it, clack the drinks.” You could sing that sentence to yourself a million times and never arrive at the way Smino raps it. On “MERLOT” Smino and one other singer conjure up a knotty harmony like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.Īll of those vocal tricks help Smino shape words to make them rhyme unexpectedly or to unlock new spaces inside them by folding them up into his breath. He doubles his vocals and self-harmonizes everywhere, and sometimes he breaks a song down into a doo-wop vamp that could easily double as an audition for Boyz II Men-if D’Angelo was singing lead. He shrieks, whispers, squeaks, mumbles, and sometimes stops just a few notes from outright yodeling. His default singing voice-which he uses to rap as well-is weightless and honeyed to the point that it’s hard to tell if he’s in a falsetto. NOIR is above all an album about language: Smino throws a million different voices into the mix, sometimes all at once. Either way, Smino is working within tradition by bending his words to his will and through his Blackness. The lyrics are unmistakably upbeat but introspective, it’s glowingly characterful while being a little bit sad and gazing at its shoes at the same time.Listening to Smino’s second album NOIR led me to an essay James Baldwin wrote for The New York Times called, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” Baldwin makes his point simply in the title but continues in the first paragraph: “Language.is meant to define the other-and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.” That came to mind when I read something Smino tweeted a few weeks ago, “dnt correct my grammar hoe I spelt it dat way kuz das high say it,” which also feels a bit like an echo of a Dunbar poem. Cam O’bi has an ear and talent for shoulder-swaying, head-nodding swing on his drums, and “Tenderheaded” featuring Smino nails this. The first available track dropped today, and it’s a gem. Cole, Noname, and more, Grown Ass Kid is fitting to be a proper, fully-realized arrival for the young artist, and I personally can’t wait. Prior to this, Cam’s considerable talents behind the boards graced artists like Chance the Rapper and SZA, but he’s now cooking up a new and proper full-length debut: Grown Ass Kid. Cam co-produced this track, and thereafter grabbed my immediate attention. The most obvious star track would have to be “Diddy Bop,” the breezy outdoor jam featuring Raury and Cam O’bi, a throwback summer joint that smelled like barbecues and stray balloons, like kids chasing harmless trouble on those endless school-less days before cellphones. I first learned about Cam from Noname’s deeply personal, fraught, but sublime classic Telefonefrom 2016, a bonafide classic record of startling intimacy. Some of you may have heard of Cam O’bi already, but remember the name.
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