The Art of Reconciliation in Rap

Reconciliation in hip-hop means different things to different people. Some rappers spend their entire careers plumbing the depths of their minds searching for peace or penance; others might look to justify unpleasant memories, or the rewards that came from overcoming them. Many of my favorite MCs aren’t necessarily the ones who come out on top of whatever struggles they face; they tend to be the ones who confront their personal wins and losses, or the state of the world around them, honestly and openly, with the fear or hope of doing it all again tomorrow. That type of self-awareness is integral to growth as an artist and a human being, and is increasingly crucial as rap moves beyond its first 50 years and generates more and more older participants. 

Recently, I’ve been stuck on the reconciliatory work of two rappers—Malice, one-half of the Virginia duo Clipse with his brother Pusha T, and California-via-Chicago rapper-producer Open Mike Eagle. Both are veterans of their respective scenes, artists who’ve shuffled between labels, trends, and industry bullshit, and come out as creative and reflective writers willing to sling wisdom and a joke or two at whoever’s listening. Their respective latest projects, Clipse’s comeback, Let God Sort Em Out, and Mike’s tenth studio album, Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, find them at a crossroads, working through trauma and conflicting interests in their pursuits of rap glory.

It’s miraculous Malice is back rapping in this capacity at all. He famously bowed out of the Clipse after 2009’s Til The Casket Drops, citing a change of conscience spurred by his then-recent conversion to Christianity. Going back as far as “I’m Not You,” the closing track from their 2002 debut Lord Willin’, the tug-of-war between coke-dealing, rap celebrity, and his burgeoning piety has frequently fueled his writing. After an album’s worth of playing chicken with the feds and nights spent macking on women in clubs, Malice acknowledges the pain of poisoning his community, painting a crude religious portrait (“It pains me to see them need this / All of them lost souls and I’m their Jesus”) before damning himself to the endless cycle of pushing his drug-heavy music. But those realities, combined with the hollow excess surrounding him, ate away at his soul for years, inspiring further digging before he stepped away and released two staunchly non-secular solo projects in the 2010s.

Malice’s return to the Clipse on Let God Sort Em Out is a reset equipped with heavier baggage. 16 years removed from calling himself “Wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked,” he’s back at it for the love of the game. He’s spent much of Let God’s vaunted album press run grateful for his decision to slow down and reevaluate his mix of the heinous and holy. “God has sat me down, and I spent time reading his words,” he told GQ. “I can identify the problems. You see people’s ego taking them left and taking them right, and you can just tell they have never learned to just sit down.” Every studio session began with a prayer between Malice and his engineer, then commenced with lines about serving cocaine as strong as a “Mike Tyson blow to the face,” bouncing back and forth with hilariously severe whiplash. Malice has reconciled himself fully on Let God Sort Em Out—he’s back to spew venom and holy water all at once.

His hefty tenor is still a precise instrument, nimble enough to rip hairline fractures in beats and rappers’ egos.  On “P.O.V.,” he’s back in panoramic drug-story mode, drawing lines between modern rappers’ false images (“I done sung along with rappers I never believed,” he snarls) and the Devil inside him encouraging he take the money on the table. “So Far Ahead” picks further at that scab. Malice still feels guilt over frivolous spending and dodging whistleblowers who could’ve sent him to jail, having survived to tell the tale through grace and luck. “I done been both Mason Bethas,” he says, finding parallels in Mase’s spiritual journey from Bad Boy pioneer to pastor to sports and culture commentator. He wields this duality like a blade cutting away at the vines of doubt crushing his mind. It’s possible to flip movies like The Revenant and 300 into cocaine puns and give thanks to angels while fighting your demons, as he does across the album. There are less excuses and unsure workarounds in the verses, Malice’s words clear and assured as diamonds in the bezel of an Audemars Piguet watch. I’d expect nothing less from a man who’s spent this press run wearing a diamond-encrusted pendant of Jesus’s face. 

Open Mike Eagle’s restructuring of self is more esoteric. He’s spent the last 15 years spinning racism, nerd culture, and the ups and downs of modern life into melodic nuggets of indie rap. This is a guy who once dedicated an entire album to turning Chicago’s infamous Robert Taylor Homes into a living, breathing being and has found the melancholic humor in everything from over-reliance on smartphones to anime power fantasies. Many of Mike’s songs center around different forms of media—TV, music, wrestling—how they gradually become coping mechanisms for us and the anxiety that leaks into real life when those coping mechanisms fail. Neighborhood Gods Unlimited literalizes that concept by bringing it to its abstract extreme. It started as part of a larger idea for a TV show called Dark Comedy Television about an imaginary network that could only afford to run a slate of programming for one hour, meaning all the shows were compressed into chunks so bite-sized, they would make Adult Swim blush. Mike decided to turn this concept into an album where each song is its own little story slowly melting into a pile of idiosyncrasies—imagine Liquid Television if it was inspired by MF Doom and Boots Riley instead of Salvador Dali.  

Mike isn’t reconciling anything nearly as life-or-death as Malice is, but NGU’s core is built from the pieces of a broken psyche he’s working to rearrange. “I was shattered as a young person and I spent the majority of my life not knowing it,” he says in the album’s press release. “In my ignorance I would go on to shatter myself even further because it was all I knew. This is a story about how people who are trying to find themselves get confused when they encounter things that remind them of themselves.” There’s no particular action or event Mike is fixing to atone for across NGU—he’ll just settle for feeling comfortable in his own skin.

The shattering lingers over all of Mike’s stories here, which play out like high-concept anthology stories worthy of an episode of Atlanta. The softly melodic “contraband (the plug has bags of me)” imagines Mike’s ego separated and sold like weed nuggets, each section walled off from the others. That metaphor continues into “ok but I’m the phone screen,” where a story of a broken phone leads to lost song demos and a severe case of writer’s block. “This is a little like when RZA’s basement flooded and he lost all them discs/It’s like that but like, less devastating,” he deadpans in the song’s outro, finding humor in his own existential crisis. Mike pinpoints these mental phenomena so specifically and with such broad reference points that it can feel like he’s lived a thousand lives.   

One of the album’s most poignant moments comes near the end on “rejoinder (burning the last puzzle piece),” where Mike personifies these missing fragments and tracks them down one by one (“I saw you off of Washington / I saw you off of Instagram / I remember where you used to live”), only to discover that restructuring himself isn’t the cure-all he thought it would be. That summation of the album’s ultimate thesis—healing is a process with no true end—makes for a devastating coda. It’s softened by producer Nolan The Ninja’s blissful beat and Mike’s feathery hook that sounds like a jingle for some long-forgotten sitcom. The reconciliation is in knowing that there’s few solid answers, but in having the strength of will to better yourself anyway. 

There’s no clear path through the brushes of self-acceptance, especially as a rapper. Society expects you to be walking bravado, confident and without the least bit of shame. Through divine absolution and a lot of mental elbow grease, respectively, Malice and Open Mike Eagle don’t just lower their guards, but find peace in the ways they move through the world. Malice isn’t looking for anyone’s permission to turn his sordid past into a golden future, and Mike isn’t afraid to turn his mental health journey into a fanciful episode of his own personal HBO Max series. By reconciling with themselves and doing the work, they’re freer than they’ve ever been.