Origins: Brazil, Madagascar, Russia, USA, Mexico, Pakistan.Color: blue, yellow, pink, red, brown, green, colorless.Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. “I think I’m finally finding me/My whole life it’s been hide and seek,” he confesses on the cinematic “Mirror.” All across this album, Jones makes that self-discovery evident with light-footed ease.Ĭatch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Still, Jones is clearly operating at a more thoughtful and focused level here than on Arcade. The relaxed pace lets Jones zoom in and out of conflicts, whether calling out overbearing performances of masculinity and the way he’s conformed to them himself on “D.I.A.L.” and the lustful “Black Tame,” or later leaning into a free-wheeling, surreal self-portrait on the standout, freestyle-like “Buggin’.” Over a scuffed beat, Jones raps with veering flow switch-ups about seeing a spider on the wall and imagining a day in its life, all to land on a universal truth no matter who or what you are: “If you not light on your feet, you might get crushed next.”ĭon’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma only errs when Jones runs into the occasionally clunky punchline (“Counting every second like they sang for Rent,” “Everybody want the plug, I’d rather be the adapter”). Jones’s stories are amplified by the warm, easygoing backdrops. “Now you got me backpedaling/Psychiatrist not helping me/Your childhood not so heavenly.” It’s the kind of brisk analysis that typifies the album, open-hearted even as he tackles self-doubt. “I’m cycling through memories/Hindsight is 20/20 clean,” he admits. While recounting his hard-nosed adolescence missing class and getting into fights, a moment of clarity arrives. Jones goes back to high school on the sunny “D.I.A.L.,” landing on different pockets of rhythm against horns, a shuffling beat, and washes of electric guitar. That brooding, introspective side gives the album tension even in its brighter moments. The soulful instrumentation avoids pastiche even as Jones mines influences like Sly and the Family Stone and Funkadelic, with his voice pitched up on the chorus and a gimlet-eyed ending to his reverie: “You know we just imitate what the parents show/The bad habits, the trust issues, the marriage woes/We inherit those.” During a family gathering that takes place in “Herringbone,” reminiscences of cookouts past are lit up by rhythmic bass guitar, synths, and pattering drums. The album itself evokes Jones’s youth through spoken-word segments from family members and lively, well-defined details in sound and lyrics. Jones’s version-“C” is for code-switching, “I” is for intellectual property, and so on-is a concise framing device for his coming-of-age tales and musings on education, family, and music, aided by beautifully filmed depictions of Black identity and culture from all along the East Coast to flesh out the album’s more introspective themes. The short, which won a Sundance Jury Award earlier this year, updates the Black ABCs, an educational program started in the 1970s by Chicago teachers and the Society for Visual Education to educate Black youth through illustrated flash cards. In the album’s accompanying 35-minute film, co-directed by Jones and creative team rubberband., he crafts a semiotics lesson in Black cultural history, spliced together with dreamlike staged sequences, clips from home movies, and interviews with family members, teachers, activists, and artists including Black Thought and Ivy Sole.
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