If $ilkMoney truly doesn’t give fuck about this rap shit, then this is not how to prove it. “Never make it seem like you’re trying too hard,” has always been one the mantras of the former Divine Council member, but he almost contravened it by noticeably aiming to make his debut on Lex Records his best album yet. Emphasis on “almost”: the sentence-long, wacky song titles; the random references he doesn’t mind going over listeners’ heads (from Shinzō Abe to Doug Dimmadome); the minimalist song structure, dive-right-in opening verses and disdain for hooks… It still seems as if $ilk is rapping for himself rather than for the audience. MF Doom’s best disciples are the ones who grasped what made him so special: indifference, impudence, an almost pathological self-confidence. They understand that you don’t emulate Doom through imitation, but by being the brashest version of yourself.
For $ilk, this entails jumping from vivid to vociferous, from high to horny, from pillar to post. Label him “psychedelic”, but the Virginia MC isn’t a passively atmospheric trapper or your friendly neighborhood pothead: he’s a wordy, bar-for-bar lyricist, with a knack for blending absurdist digressions and socially conscious outbursts. In his vein of psychedelia, the psilocybin-pervaded blood boils, and his vision of what Black liberation entails remains crystal clear (despite hallucinogens). On this project, nowhere is his vintage mix of dark humour and uncompromising sociopolitics more homogenous than on ‘Prolly Wouldn’t Be Here If We Woulda Been Killed That N***a King Bach’, a song where he deplores the uncle-tomfoolery of Black influencers like Kai Cenat and Jonathan Majors’ convenient use of Meagan Good at his 2023 trial for assault and harrassment. $ilk’s verdict ? “Drop these motherfuckers in some chicken grease”.
You might find some of the numerous, odd namedrops and quadra-syllabic rhymes a bit contrived, but ask yourself: who else could’ve made “Tamagotchi” rhyme with “Junya Watanabe”. Even when $ilk doesn’t hit the target, he never underhits, and his full-throttle delivery means the album is never allowed to dwell on its weaker moments. When you get to its strongest, it’s like JPEGMafia sounding off on a Dilla beat, or Open Mike Eagle’s evil twin having a really bad day: take for instance the few brazen bars on ‘Ooops, Honey I Shrunk Myself With The Honey I Shrunk The Kids Ray Machine And Crawled Into Your Dickhole By Accident’, where he wittingly disparages the two one-time collaborators he’s often reductively linked to: “Andre three houses down stole my bike / Tyler, he the neighbor that flown my kite / But I’ll get him back cause this 45 nice”.
Lines like these make it plain to see that $ilk is in fact at his most captivating when he does care. His rapping-for-the-sake-of-it skills are like close combat: they do damage, but on their own they’re not enough to steadily defeat the opponent (and win over his listeners). Hence why, for the past three years, he’s been ki-charging a different kind of move, one more akin to an energy blast. He finally lets it rip on this album: opening up. Who Waters The Wilting Giving Tree… is above all an audacious, self-reflective, concept album of sorts, that uses Shel Silverstein’s children’s book, The Giving Tree as a template to question whether (or how) abnegation can define one’s own sense of worth. As such, even if there are still experimental and afro-futuristic tinges, this album is more grounded than the last: $ilk and Khalil Blu’s arrays into progressive soul, their Soulquarians-style samples and wavy melodies counterbalance the former’s intensity with a sense of calm befitting introspection. Their refined production creates the kind of depth wherein his more personal lyrics can come through. Tellingly, on the previous album, the breather was a skit about the price of pussy: on this one, it’s spiritual recitation on a mellowy instrumental (‘I’ve Been Doing This Thing All Wrong The Whole Time, That’s Crazy, Holup’).
To quote said skit, $ilk is “no longer afraid to fall” – inward, that is. Drugs aren’t fun on ‘The $400 Cheeseburger From The Window Shopper Video Was Just A Big Mac –_-’; they’re a gateway to solitude and nihilism (“I sit alone in my more-than-four corner bedroom … doin’ shrooms … uninspired, losing my desire as my inner child’s presumptive abundance cries”). There are no random references to iCarly or claims to come from the 10th dimension on ‘First I Give Up, Then I Give In, Then I Give All’ or ‘There Are Hills And Mountains Between Us, Always Something To Get Over’: just authentic, plain-spoken words from Murphy Graves, respectively addressed to his child, in the arms of whom he’d rather die than “live too far”, and his partner, whom he doesn’t even call a bitch “when [he talks] to [his] n***as” (an unfortunate high bar).
And while it might seem straightforward to use The Giving Tree as the central metaphor for an album where you give so much of yourself, it should be said that exploring all the ramifications of that metaphor would be anything but. There is great risk in giving your all to “something that never owed you shit to begin with”: it’s a gamble on fulfilment. As the ending of ‘Pneumonoultramicroscpopic(nobody)silicovolcanoboniosis…’ reminds us, quoting in a haunting echo what might be the most important passage of Silverstein’s story, the tree is happy to give, “…but not really”. “How could I ever be more than I am if I give me all away ?” ponders $ilk. If one never takes, one ends up with nothing to give. Don’t let the giving tree wilt: let him take an hour of your time.
