The Chicago rapper steps further into the mainstream on his third album, an ultimately hopeful exploration of how trauma manifests.
Like Chief Keef, Lil Durk, and many others before him, Polo G’s early success was quite literally a ticket out of town. Not long after recording his major-label debut Die a Legend, the northside Chicago rapper packed up his family and moved to Los Angeles in an attempt to avoid fulfilling the prophecy of his album’s title. And while going to LA to work in music is a common migration, it tends to be as much of a survival tactic as it is a career move for Chicago rappers. Polo G remains a fervent booster of his hometown, but the move has clearly changed his perspective. How could it not?
To that end, his latest LP Hall of Fame is as much Hollywood as it is Chiraq. Polo’s style of melodic drill—sparse compositions comprising soft piano melodies and gentle guitars atop booming basslines—is tailored to convey emotion, an intentional diversion from the bleak murder raps of drill’s first wave. His Auto-Tune croon of a flow blurs the lines between hook and verse, with few wasted moments; almost every song is at or under three minutes. And by this point, Polo has helped shift drill so far into the mainstream that twinkling ballads like “Epidemic” have as much in common with Ed Sheeran as they do Lil Durk.
But wherever you go, the memories of lost loved ones follow, and death continues to loom large in Polo’s music. His career has been defined by an exploration of the depths of his trauma to cope with funeral fatigue and the creeping normalization of people around him dying young. Upon the release of Die a Legend, he lamented to Pitchfork, “After a kid in our school dies at 13, no therapists are there. We just deal with it ourselves.” It’s not a tragedy, but an inevitability. Two years later, Polo has put out the most hopeful—and commercial—record of his career. While his first two LPs coped with death (often with pills), Hall of Fame finds him facing forward: Father to a young son, poised for fame and looking to leave behind the drugs that would numb his pain but take his friend.
Polo is far from the first rapper to show a sensitive side, but his perspective feels particularly empathetic and self-aware. He doesn’t just lament the violence that colored his upbringing—he seems to understand better than most how that trauma manifests, coloring his verses with poignant moments that tell entire stories. “Ain’t no limit in these streets/Can ride a bike, you old enough,” he raps on “Black Hearted.” He still wields considerable talent as a lyricist, dropping brazen one-liners as deftly as he transitions from gun-toting villain (“Aim for the head, that chopper spray/We get ’em gone”) to mixtape-making loverboy (“I got a playlist for your heart, girl, pick a song”)—sometimes in the same verse. But he also seems to be running out of ways to describe familiar scenes, like the image of blood soaking into a white t-shirt on both “Boom” and “RAPSTAR.”
To take a step further into the mainstream, Polo taps an array of producers, and while he has a strong ear, his distinct taste in instrumentals lends itself to homogeneity, with tracks like “Go Part 1” teetering on the edge of generic. “Broken Guitars,” featuring his protégé Scorey, is a notable exception, though its crunchy guitar textures and Polo’s soaring emo vocals might sound more at home on a Lil Peep or Juice WRLD record. That track’s producer, the nascent WIZARDMCE, has likely the largest influence on the sound of Hall of Fame outside of Polo himself. The five tracks he produced are some of the record’s strongest, even if they do get buried in the 20-deep tracklist. By track 20, Polo’s vivid revenge narrative “Bloody Canvas” feels out of place. And though it serves as a thematic bookend with opener “Painting Pictures,” its bleak depiction of cyclical violence is an awkward coda to a record that’s often wistful but mostly optimistic.
It would be easy to read Hall of Fame as the inevitable result of a young artist’s career being shaped by major label A&Rs. The bloated tracklist is stuffed full of stars from hip-hop and pop’s mainstream. And indeed, many of the knocks on the album are rooted in the trends and tactics of the major label machine. But a closer look reveals decisions made with as much of Polo’s intention as Columbia’s. Take “RAPSTAR,” the ukulele-driven hit single that recently topped the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. It’s co-produced by Einer Bankz, a YouTuber who courted viral fame via acoustic ukulele performances with what seems like every rapper on the planet, and who has made videos for Polo’s last two album rollouts. When fans rabidly consumed the impromptu acoustic version of “RAPSTAR,” it was Polo who campaigned hard to make the studio version an official single, blowing up Columbia’s rollout for Hall of Fame in the process.
Though Polo has proven he can carry an LP on his own, the guest stars help infuse Hall of Fame with new energies. Wayne’s light and limber verse on “GANG GANG” is a refreshing return to form, and Roddy Ricch’s appearance on “Fame & Riches” helps pick up the pace after the saccharine serenades of “So Real.” But Nicki Minaj’s contribution to “For the Love of New York” should probably have stayed in the can; from the first bar, she sounds too exhausted to even bother rhyming different words.
On the whole, Hall of Fame is missing the sense of urgency of Polo’s debut. Years and miles away from the streets that shaped him, this was perhaps inevitable. If Die a Legend was an insular, tightly woven portrait of a teenager manifesting his future, Hall of Fame is a cluster bomb aimed squarely at the mainstream, chock full of everything he could think of that might help him graduate to the next tier of stardom. Somewhere among those 20 tracks is a good album, but at this stage in his career, chiseling it down to perfection almost seems beside the point. Consider the “RAPSTAR” video in comparison with early clips of Polo, pre-record deal with short hair and lanky limbs, and it quickly becomes apparent how much he’s grown in just two years. He’ll probably always be looking over his shoulder—after his recent run-in with the police, it’s clear he has good reason to. Yet even as he plays the game, serving up consumable bits for his label to package and sell, the heart remains in the music, buried under gold chains, wounded by the past yet hopeful for the future.
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