Jidenna - The Chief

Pitchfork 58

Jidenna cut a memorable figure when he emerged in 2015, looking like a roguish extra from a cancelled period drama: natty three-piece suit, slim cane with gilded accents, shiny cufflinks. He proved to be a shrewd repackager on “Classic Man,” which pulled from DJ Mustard’s minimalist bounce and made it No. 22 on the Hot 100. But in his efforts to break out of one-hit-wonder-dom and demonstrate a wide range on his debut album The Chief, Jidenna sometimes comes off as shapeless.

You might have seen this coming: Jidenna has spent the past two years releasing a series of singles with the apparent goal of appearing on as many Spotify playlists as possible. “Long Live the Chief,” carried by a squeaky, nails-on-the-chalkboard synth tone, was a distant descendant of Jeru the Damaja’s 1993 boom-bap classic “Come Clean;” “Chief Don’t Run” paired bluster with a beat that sounded like a more ornate version of Tyga’s “Rack City;” and “Little Bit More” seemed built for the express purpose of giving DJs something to play after Justin Bieber’s “Sorry.”

It turns out these singles offered just a sample of Jidenna’s talents—this is a man with a suit for every occasion. “Trampoline” channels festive brass, while “Bambi” attempts an audacious combination of post-war crooning and of-the-moment drum programming. There’s hammy singing with piano (or strings), more strains of pop-hip-hop, you name it, and the 31-year-old stacks a jumble of imagery on this changing bedrock. He loves animal metaphors—“A lion don't ever lose sleep when it comes to sheep” or “shit’s getting wild—safari!”—and drawing from a well worn selection of cultural titans: Frank Sinatra and the Dalai Lama, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, James Bond (“He’s a Roger Moore nigger/I’m a Sean Connery”).

Between all the beasts of prey and Madame Tussauds-worthy famous figures, Jidenna also alludes to police violence and racial inequality, and these moments tend to be his sharpest. “They’ll shoot you down without warning,” he laments on “Helicopters,” displaying the hoarsest—and strongest—part of his voice. The most potent song on The Chief comes second to last: “White Niggas” imagines a white family that is struggling with addiction to prescription drugs and facing the same sort of systematic police oppression that afflicts black communities. It’s a simple premise with a big pay-off.

Jidenna tries on styles and allusions, but he doesn’t always fill them out or imbue them with personality. At a time when many rappers shift tone from syllable to syllable, you’ll find little of that excitement on The Chief. He often delivers rapped lines conversationally and sings cleanly, but neither register has much character. Given this, his turn to the dancefloor on “Little Bit More” represents a canny understanding of his strengths. In the business of making immensely popular songs for warm-weather events, the vocals are meant to be smooth—any sort of burrs represent an impediment to frictionless forward locomotion. Here, where anonymity is prized, Jidenna sounds most comfortable.