Vic Mensa - The Autobiography

The Guardian 80

(Roc Nation)

Vic Mensa’s life story unfurls on Memories on 47th St, a tour of the rapper’s upbringing in Chicago. Lyrically dextrous, some of it is familiar from testimonies past: absent father, “kicked out of kindergarten”, police brutality, tagging graffiti; someone HIV-positive shoots up. Then Mensa falls from a bridge and gets a huge electric shock sneaking into Lollapalooza. This is a rapper who bristles with righteous anger and no little humour, dramatising heists (Heaven on Earth) and raging at self-medication. But like his friend, Chance the Rapper, Mensa has a wider brief on his debut album proper than hood reportage; previous songs have hopped around topics and genres(dance music, bombastic Kanye collaborations; here are arresting departures like the slow, hyper-modern torch song Coffee & Cigarettes or the closing electronic rock ballad Rage.

Pitchfork 69

The Chicago rapper’s first milestone is a careful step in his legacy-building business. It's an obvious turn inward, but Vic also digs his heels into his political ground.

The Guardian 60

(Roc Nation)

Three years after his breakthrough with hip-house anthem Down on My Luck, Vic Mensa has apparently scrapped one album on the way to this debut – clearly aiming for the kind of grand rap statement that, a la Kendrick, unites the old and new schools. His candour about depression and drug addiction is arresting, as on the Pharrell track Wings, where pills turn him into “an armoured truck riding the rink”; woman trouble is amusingly, vividly rendered on Gorgeous, as he courts someone who “can detect a bitch from an eyelash”. There are also some brilliant production flourishes, such as Homewrecker turning Weezer’s The Good Life into a boom-bap ode to his baboon-bottomed girlfriend. The trouble is that the timbre of his voice is a little colourless, and audibly draws on the intonation of others: the laconic astonishment of Big Sean, the conversational musicality of J Cole and Common, and the jazzy hectoring of Mensa’s beef target, Drake. He may need another three years to craft a voice of his own.