AOTY #22: Open Mike Eagle - Dark Comedy

Long seen as a voice of the youth, hip-hop nowadays stands in stark contrast to that. Unless your life is a walking commercial, unless you’ve sold more cocaine than is physically possible to make, or have a legitimate harem of women, chances are, you’re not able to relate to what’s being put out today. The few bright spots of this – Kendrick Lamar’s day-in-a-life good kid, m.A.A.d. city, as one shining example – are greatly outweighed by the glut of (albeit fun) delusional ignorance. Thankfully, however, we have the underground spin-off of “art rap” to save us. Enter Open Mike Eagle

Mr. Eagle’s (come on, you know that’s fun to say) 2014 effort Dark Comedy is an album for the millennials, an album, for better or worse, for the majority of hip-hop’s consumer base today. Over the course of thirteen songs, the man who admits he’s “bad at sarcasm so I work in absurdity” forges a surprisingly grounded work. Where alt-rap heroes like Das Racist kept an intelligence quotient requirement to fully enter their work or El-P’s soundtracks to paranoid schizophrenia, Mike takes Curren$y’s “lifestyle rap” mantra and makes it about a relatable lifestyle. Take the hook to “Very Much Money (Ice King Dreams)”:

My friends are superheroes
None of us have very much money, though
They can fly, run fast, read Portuguese
None of us have very much money, thoughAnd it continues like that. They’re millennials, hustling, struggling, enjoying what talents they have while always looking for the next come-up. It’s all too familiar

To commend all of the fantastic normalities of his subject matter is doing an injustice to what makes this album work so well: dude can rap, and dude’s got a great ear for beats. Returning to the Curren$y comparison above, one could hear him spitting a couple of guests verses over these floaty, orchestral instrument-featuring beats. They never impose themselves, instead acting as guides for the monotone Mike to relay his daily on-goings. For an album titled Dark Comedy, there’s a plethora. Featured artist Hannibal Burress drops a line that rings out especially prescient, from the excellent song “Doug Stamper Advice Raps”:

LeBron James needs to stop taking HGH
His hairline fucked up from the HGH
Went from one hair band to like, eighty-eightOh, and there’s a line about C.I.A. torturers, too. (Dark comedy.)

Few times does rap make us listen and say “Yeah! I know what you mean!” anymore, but Dark Comedy stands as a forty-four minute testament to being a millennial. You might not have the same penchant for words that Open Mike Eagle possesses, but it’s pretty certain you and your friends know what it’s like to not have very much money, though

Brian Duricy subsists off coffee and burritos like a true struggling youth

Come back tomorrow for album #21 and follow along with the list here!