If there still is such a thing as the American Dream, it feels like the type that immediately dissolves as soon as you wake up. The shit your parents may have been promised in their youth—whether they were born here, were forced to come here, or arrived on their own volition—was probably promised to you, too. Go to school, get a job, buy a house, that sort of thing. But anyone too young to recall where they were when the Towers fell could tell you that pathway is all but obsolete. Where true optimism may have once been abundant, it now comes in small, ephemeral doses. Sometimes, optimism comes in the form of distraction. At this very moment, it sounds like Jaeychino.
I keep coming back to “DRUGS AIN NUN,” a charming loosie released ahead of the D.C. rapper’s electric new full-length, IF YOU KNEW. In the video, backed by champagne synths and hopscotching snares, a tuxedoed Jaeychino strolls the beach in Margiela sneakers, his jacket flapping in the wind as seafoam washes ashore. With a boxy aspect ratio and grainy finish, it’s so aesthetically YMCMB that I feel the hope of my preteen self bubbling up my chest. There’s this prevailing sentiment of perseverance in spite of grief, and a compulsion to dedicate his success to those who witnessed the journey. How I imagine millennials felt about Meek Mill’s first wave of motivational rap is how I feel now; every invocation of violence is buoyed by the pursuit of a life away from it.
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“DRUGS AIN NUN” and the entirety of IF YOU KNEW position Jaeychino at the edge of his crabs-in-a-bucket DMV beginnings, so close to real wealth that his knuckles are white from popping bottles at the pregame. He’s as callous and reflective as he’s ever been, balancing his knack for provocation with a desire to mature and inspire. Abundant are the invitations of death and the surprise visits that follow, the firearms and fabrics pressed against skin, the clarity of sobriety and the joy of indulgence, all packaged in a way that feels like reaching the mountaintop.
It’s really the undercurrent of hope that sticks with me. “I’m so, so proud of you,” Chino’s little cousin says over the tearjerking piano of “AKEELAH.” “Like look at you, still standing, still grinding… Can’t nobody take that from you!” So much of Jaeychino’s ethos is informed by the improbability of beating the odds, the sentimentality that comes with that, and the ability to flex on niggas when your tears dry up. Often, on tracks like “AKEELAH,” it makes for a beautiful, challenging, heartrending contradiction: Just as quickly as he commends himself for being “the man he became,” he boasts about the murders his homie can claim. It seems morality for him is a spectrum, with vengeance on one side and altruism on the other. “Believe in yoself, man you gotta do right,” he raps on “DID IT FOR YALL.” The intro track, a tribute to his daughter who passed during childbirth, is full of “long live”s, luxury embraces, and trenchbaby vignettes. He peels off in Ferraris and thinks of those back home who could never afford one; he dances with neighborhood junkies and offers a friend a couple racks to stop taking pills. Who is he if not the breadth of where he came from?
