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If Fiona Apple isn’t the soundtrack for your current circumstances, this might be. This uneasy alliance of loneliness, fear and misery related in aching beauty may have a particular resonance for some. His trademark is a quivering sob always threatening his delivery. It’s ethereal and beautiful which offsets how staggeringly bleak it all is. But Rod has an otherworldly gift for melody and a haunting voice. When you consider his album title, I assume he’s referring to love from God, not another person. He sees it as pain that doesn’t hurt yet. There are plenty of love songs, but Rod’s relationship with love is like a velociraptors relationship to an electrified fence. There’s nowhere to catch your breath on his records. If this sounds like a tough hang, it both is and isn’t. He has songs with 10 million-plus plays, but his “hits” are downers that almost celebrate the pain and nihilism they’re drenched in. He appropriately references Pac, who would fuck with him, on “Ribbon in the Sky”. Nothing is uptempo or even remotely hopeful. There’s no mainstream singles and few features besides his executive producer and favorite rapper Kevin Gates. Rod is one of the most singular artists working today. The religious intimations of his two album titles extend to his music.
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It only serves to underline the sense that he’s making something older than rap. He gets through what feels like a few distracted, intensely personal bars larded with gospel, drops a hook with its own gravitational field and gets out. The songs are short - three minutes is an opus for Rod. He gravitates towards basic piano loops and Tracy Chapman blues licks. On his new album Pray 4 Love, and on his debut, Ghetto Gospel, he shows simple and powerful taste in production. The divine is very present in Rod’s catalogue.
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He claims in his lyrics he’s been here before, and you can hear the old soul at work in his wisdom. That this was all for nothing and the only outlet he has is the therapy of his music. He plainly states at the age of 20 he’s been ruined by the cycles of poverty and violence he miraculously survived and continues to resent. Rod Wave is at once ancient and progressive in his insistence that the trauma he’s experienced in his life as a young, poor person of color from Florida is not a path to redemption. Their music, like the world, has been getting increasingly hopeless and nihilistic, but they pull up just short of total despair.
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Artists like Scarface, Boosie, Kevin Gates, Trae, Z-Ro, NBA Youngboy and Gunna have displayed a specific talent for working dark. In the years since, many rappers have forwarded this concept. And it makes sense: it’s human nature to want to believe that suffering is for something, that there’s a reward waiting for us somewhere down the line. It related the embarrassment and depression of growing up poor in harrowing but ultimately humanist terms. “All That I Got is You,” was a revolutionary personal confession that pulled away from the “Tearz” and “Millie Shot Santa Clause” style of anecdotal tragic hood narrative. Much of the history of struggle rap has embodied this sentiment. “God” doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle. The idea that the struggles you endure only make you stronger and better equipped for the next challenge. The conventional narrative is often constructed around the glass half-full philosophy.
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Life is a series of down endings and there’s an entire industry built around how to cope with your pain. Please support our bars by subscribing to Passion of the Weiss on Patreon.Ībe Beame takes solemn drives in a vintage Mercedes-Benz.