mick jenkins the pursuit of happyness download

Its outrage, frustration, and despair convey the weight of the burden Jenkins feels himself carrying-and share some of it with his audience.īy the time “11” came out, though, Jenkins was ready to shift gears for his next release. For those shows, he performed lots of material from The Water, and the gnawing, minimalist “11” picks up where that mixtape left off. Smoker’s Club cofounder Jonny Shipes, who also runs management company and label Cinematic Music Group, has been working with Jenkins since last winter the Cinematic roster also includes hit makers Big K.R.I.T. Jenkins wrote and recorded “11” after a 36-show run on the fifth annual Smoker’s Club Tour, traveling with Taylor Gang rapper Berner, Cypress Hill’s B-Real, and the duo of Method Man and Redman. He’s always done him-he’s done what he wanted to do.” “As much as people like to that having purpose or a message in your music is lame and people don’t care, they actually do,” says Andrew Barber, founder of Chicago-based hip-hop site Fake Shore Drive. It uses water as a metaphor for knowledge, and his ambitious, sure-footed rhymes confront the cycle of poverty and violence that he sees trapping his south-side community. His breakthrough mixtape, The Water, which came out in August, addresses those issues on almost every one of its 15 soul-steeped tracks. When “11” came out, Jenkins had already been rapping about racism, classism, and hip-hop politics for years. “And everybody wanna be a nigga,” he sing-speaks in the bridge, “But don’t nobody wanna be a nigga.” As the song ends, he repeats “I can’t breathe” 11 times-the same number of times Garner did as he died. Partway through the track Jenkins climbs from his usual self-possessed baritone into a half scream burning with anger and disillusionment. The south-side MC decries the way corporations and celebrities (“From ComEd to Converse to Kanye to Complex”) profit from black youth culture while the communities that create it are forced to do without almost everything (“Potholes fill faster than our needs”). Released on December 28, Jenkins’s haunting single “11” would sound dystopian if it were fiction.

Garner’s cry for help while trapped by Pantaleo’s illegal chokehold-”I can’t breathe”-became a cry of protest all over the country, and few used it as effectively as Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins. It had hardly been a week since a grand jury in Missouri did the same for Darren Wilson, who’d killed Michael Brown. On December 3, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner.

Mick jenkins the pursuit of happyness download