Sometimes it’s simple, sometimes it’s complex as fuck. Like that’s how I wrote “90 Proof.” I was going through some shit and literally made a song in like 10, 15 minutes about it. Sometimes something might have just happened. Sometimes I need to actually see my thoughts in front of me. Lately I’ve been writing out my raps in my Few Good Things journal that Saba dropped. What’s your writing process like? Are you writing shit down? Is it improvisational? It might make you uncomfortable - even on the first time you heard, you might not even like it, but then you’ll hear it somewhere and be like, Damn, what the fuck …? It’s just rhythms in general, feel me? That shit just kind of make your body do stuff, so I be tryna flow in a way that make somebody move different than they used to. I look at everything about how I play the high hat on drums. They was in that bitch screaming, “Go, Chris,” and shit.ĭid drumming influence your cadences or flows at all?Ī hundred percent. And my grandma made my daddy buy me some fucking bongos, and he did, obviously, ’cus that’s his momma. I could play the drum set a little bit, but I wasn’t that good. My whole family knew I always wanted to play drums. Like in elementary school, first-grade-type shit. It was like the first time I ever performed in front of people. Was that the start of the journey for you? So when you were super-young, your grandmother gave you some bongos to play. Neither are the conversations about R&B’s apparent death. But any hard and fast definition of who or what Smino is doing on a record isn’t worth too much to him. Can his voice peak without cracking and chew up syllables like the ripest tobacco leaf? You bet your ass. Can he sing-song-slur a word better than most rappers you know? Absolutely. Luv 4 Rent is Smino’s most well-balanced album, where an adequate amount of rappin-ass wit dovetails with an ever-expanding vocality. “I still don’t know where the fuck my family is from,” he responds when asked about the importance of ancestry, “but I know what we’re about, so that means the world to me.” What they’re about, largely, is music and the collective joy that comes from performing it. Speaking with him last week, ahead of Luv 4 Rent’s release, it’s clear Smino moves and thinks generationally, and is undoubtedly informed by the Black musical stylings - gospel, blues, R&B - of the people he comes from. That stewardship of self both in hair and skin is rooted in the very same familial bonds grounding his musical acumen. You wanna find him outside the studio? Seek out the fingers he’s trusted to get his scalp right. No pushing, no drama - just keepin’ their shit prim and proper. Each album sorta conveyed that this is just what Smi does. On his latest, Luv 4 Rent, a perched mirror is audience to Smino and a bevy of bruhs cooly hunched over, squeezing their fros into its reflection. A year later, NOIR shows him receiving what looks to be straight back cornrows between the legs of his braider while pointing a TV remote in the viewer’s direction. On 2017’s blkswn, a pair of tattooed hands are in the process of bantu-knotting the 32-year-old artist’s growing flow. Louis musician Smino has, over the last decade, graced his album covers with lush portraits of Black people taking care of themselves through their hair. One that helped us to stay alive and look absolutely gorgeous doing so. This is a generational practice of stewardship, a small daily dose of self-determination that can be both personal and shared. The goal, it’s said, is to moisturize the entirety of the Black dome from follicle’s tip down to the root, to provide pleasant comfort to oneself or another through grooming, and to, of course, look fly as fuck. Photo: Cassidy Sparrow/Getty Images for IGAįrom the outside, there’s no perceivable rhyme or reason to the pathways of greased fingers kneading a thirsty, wanting scalp.
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