The rapper’s latest album buries the past.
The rapper's latest album buries the past — a cinerary product for the self-contemptuous fury that inspired much of his earlier work.
N ate Feuerstein, known to millions as the rapper NF, is, more than anything, the voice of those devastated by America’s opioid addiction. The Gladwin, Mich., product, like his crack-epidemic-affected forebears in the genre from the ’80s and ’90s (listen to tracks such as Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads”), dwells upon what was and is, and does so far more deeply than is typical of the materially aspiring practitioners of hip-hop and rap whose words usually extol the proceeds of their petty violence and guile.
For NF, his experience with opioids came in the form of his absent mother, whose addiction and its resulting evils he choked and sobbed through on the crushing “How Could You Leave Us” in Therapy Session (2016).
He wrote then:
Welcome to the bottom of hell
They say pain is a prison, let me out of my cell
You say you proud of me, but you don’t know me that well
Sit in my room, tears running down my face and I yell
Into my pillowcases, say you coming to get us
Then call a minute later just to tell us you not, I’m humiliated
I’m in a room with a parent that I barely know
Some lady in the corner watching us, while she taking notes.
One of NF’s tracks from his new album Hope returns — after seven years, three albums, a marriage, and a child — to his mom’s grave. This time, he has made his peace with the broken woman who birthed him. He doesn’t question or blame her; he’s content to chat about the splendor of heaven that he hopes provides her a peace she never knew on earth.
He writes in “Mama”:
You ever make it up to the gate?
And if you did, I wonder, is it a beautiful place?
Did He put His arms around you, make you feel like you’re safe?
Did He grab you by the hand and say that things are okay?I gotta know, Mama, did He show you some grace?
Give you a pass and tell you He would carry the weight?
Do you smile more? Wonder what it’s like when you pray
Is He standin’ in front of you so you can look at His face?When you talk to Him, does He talk back?
You ever have conversations about what you regret?
Or did it all go away once you got there?
The theme of hard-won spiritual tranquility pervades the album. With this sixth project, counting the 2021 Clouds EP, Nate has accepted his place in the rap landscape — an “outcast” who will never enjoy the sort of mainstream accolades that drown a Drake or Kendrick Lamar. Rather, NF has battled his demons and self-loathing in threescore tracks, sitting atop the mansion — a metaphor for his mental torment — “like J. Cole” looking out from that place that’s been his home for 30 years. Along the way, he has used orchestral scores, many from talented producer Tommee Profitt’s bombastic strings, to connect the narrative from track to track and album to album.
The music videos adhere to an overarching structure, with elements — black balloons, recurring characters, and a late-’90s patina of struggling Midwesternism — wending through the experience of a poor kid who’s one step away from the trailer park. Nate does much of his own video-direction work, offering the acrid scent of Newports and yeasty Old Milwaukee while sitting on grandma’s secondhand couch waiting for an adult to appear. This hyperrealism is then interspersed with glimpses of a second universe that exists in the mind, resulting in videos replete with a Jordan Peele–esque stillness and chilling absurdity.
NF’s work up to this point has been John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress scored by Hans Zimmer. Here in Act V, Nate (Pilgrim) has dashed down his burden at the tomb and now departs along the road. Where he goes next is difficult to say; he has found the following he now enjoys by communicating the tragedy of the opioid-stricken lower classes and the catatonic towns of middle America. Whatever the future holds, this is an album worth considering — braggadocio, conciliation, and . . . hope.