Various Artists - Chi-Raq OST

Pitchfork 50

Chi-Raq suffers from Spike Lee's worst tendencies as a storyteller. The movie attempts to speak on Chicago's heartbreaking gun violence and gang culture, but it's not so much a narrative as a succession of overwrought messages and ham-fisted editorializing bolstered with history and current-events lessons, heavy statistics, and too many ideas bogged down by rhyme in an ode to the source material, Aristophanes' Athenian comedy, "Lysistrata".

The soundtrack doesn't fare much better. Like the movie—whose trailers were met with head-scratching and rebuttals from Chi-Town rappers across the board—the music was met with controversy before even being released, when DJ Slugo, a Chicago native working as the film's music supervisor, was discovered running an unnecessarily complex payola racket for soundtrack placement. Upon getting caught, Slugo apologized, writing "This is not the way Spike Lee nor his team operates and I take full responsibility for my bad decision," but the mini-scandal casts a harsh light over this collection.

Like Dr. Dre's Compton: A Soundtrack, which featured not many artists from its titular city, Chi-Raq's original motion picture soundtrack is largely devoid of Chi-Town talent. The city's hip-hop elite—Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Common—are nowhere to be found. Like wise, OG's like Twista, Crucial Conflict, and Shawnna are absent, and the new crop of progressive Chi-Town MC's—Mick Jenkins, Chance the Rapper, Rockie Fresh—aren't here. (Vic Mensa appears briefly in the movie as a hype man, but has no role in the soundtrack.) Most egregiously, save for a beat from Young Chop, there are no notables from the drill scene present—not Chief Keef, not Lil Durk, not G Herbo, or any of the other young talents who could have furthered dialogue about Chicago's horrendous and shameful bloodshed. The movie argues against intra-community crime through a lens of respectability politics—it all but ignores the systemic causes that have made the Windy City a war zone. The Chicago PD—currently under pressure for the cover up of Laquan McDonald's murder, not to mention Homan Square, its Guantanamo-like black site—is treated like an afterthought. Without an abundance of homegrown voices, nothing about Chi-Raq feels authentically Chicago.

Some of the numbers seem picked from Lee's wishful thinking. Kevon Carter's "WGDB" (for "we gotta do better," the de facto slogan of the respectability movement) is an incredibly sanctimonious string-and-keys lamentation replete with clunky (and false) observations like "We're the only race that shoots and kills themselves" and the laborious opening lines: "Everybody's talkin' about brother Bill Cosby/ Looks like our favorite dad was drugging girls." It's a song that would make sense within the context of a Hamilton-esque musical, but it's not presented in the film as a performance number—it just seems to be Lee believing his audience should be condescended to with simple answers to complex issues.

The disconnect is an extension of Lee's heavy-handed and off-center vision. Nick Cannon, who plays a gang member named Chi-Raq, comes through with two songs in character—the uplifting "Pray 4 My City" (whose lyrics are flashed across the film's opening credits with ebonicized spellings—dey, dat, dis, cuz, Lawd) and the Young Chop-produced thuggery-by-numbers of "My City". Both songs feel like they're trying to bring Afterschool Specials back. There's no true gravitas in any of it, and the only place where these songs fit is in Lee's movie, with its reliance on outdated tropes, such as a ridiculous preponderance of gang colors and a reference to Brooklyn as "Bucktown".

It's not all bad. Treasure Davis' "Simple" is a sunny and bouncing number about on-and-off love; Sam Dew's "Desperately" is yearning, body-grinding boudoir music; Mali Music and Jhené Aiko's Caribbean-tinged "Contradiction" is perfectly tailored for break-up and reconciliation. When Mali sings "If you say that it's over/ I won't die," you're not sure if he's coming or going, but it doesn't matter, because the song just works.

And here's a troubling thing: R. Kelly—still one of the most reviled and gifted artists in R&B—comes through with the album's best song. It makes so much sense—Kelly is as much a Chi-Town icon as Michael Jordan, Barack Obama, or Oprah Winfrey. And "Put the Guns Down" is topically in line with movie's message, especially with a guest verse from Tink, who notes that kids are "Fifteen, buying a tool/ Just to feel more safe when they gotta make it home from school." It's targeted, but not pedantic and—most importantly—it's girded by a four-on-the-floor track that actually entertains. When R. Kelly sings, "Just do your dance, get in your zone/ No, they can't take you out that," meaning and music come together as they do nowhere else on this album.

And that's the state of Chi-Raq, a movie that uses a term for a city that no one in the city actually uses: a soundtrack about said city that uses very few voices from the despair it seeks to shed light upon. Its best number comes from guy who is all but a pariah in the urban community, which all but ensures that none of these messages are going reach the people who need to hear them most. And that may be the real tragedy here.