Wordy, thoughtful rapping is thriving, but the Virginia-born MC makes the style feel particularly urgent. Neither his full-on delivery nor his absurdist sense of humor dilute his razor-sharp focus.
The average $ilkMoney song is stuffed with information, a veritable almanac of psychoactive drugs, John Singleton movies, and Black liberation theology. There aren’t many rappers in 2022 who could spit about phonemic orthography, like some long-lost member of X Clan, before dissing jeweler Johnny Dang and dreaming of someone stealing his stash of DMT so they can expand their minds; there are even fewer who would title the song in question “I Ate 14gs of Mushrooms and Bwoy Oh Bwoy.” But that’s exactly what the Virginia-born rapper and member of the now-defunct group Divine Council has done on his absurdly titled surprise album I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore. He may be ambivalent about the rap game—he accuses labels of low-balling him, and seems cagey about working with all but a select few rappers and producers—but his actual bars land with a white-hot intensity that could melt lead.
$ilkMoney crams syllables together in his verses, but he never succumbs to the robotic verbal fireworks of battle rap or the hokey faux-traditionalism of a Logic. The best analogues might be Extinction Level Event-era Busta Rhymes or Brooklyn rapper Elucid on pep pills; $ilk’s speed and careening rhythmic patterns never dilute his diction or razor-sharp focus. “Fuck Black Lives Matter, let’s go/Back to the days of Black power when our struggle was ours/And wasn’t monetized for the outsiders outside us,” he barks on “Cuummoney Amiliani,” in one massive gulp of breath. Just listening to him rattle off thoughts can leave you feeling winded, and that’s clearly by design—on “One Glazed and One With the Jelly Filled Nucleus,” he admits he’s not here to offer hooks or melodies. Anyone can rap fast or chortle into the mic, but $ilk’s words impact with precision, dozens of calculated blows drumming away at the chest.
In keeping with his staccato technique, $ilk favors nonsequiturs over storytelling: He jumps from rap grievances to boasts that he’s never had sex with a white woman to drug-fueled conversations with serpent gods that could’ve easily come from an episode of The Midnight Gospel. Punchlines aren’t always his focus, but much of what he says is funny or shocking in some way. In “Jodi Don’t Love Me No Mo :-(,” he invokes Jimmy Kimmel’s infamous blackface impersonation of basketball player Karl Malone, while “Emmm, Nigga You Is Tasty >:)” descends into frenzied slam poetry, casting rhythm to the wind as he laments how racism and capitalism are figuratively boiling him alive, howling, “How can I be so delicious to a nation that claims to hate my skin and existence?” Even the song titles—“A White Bitch Killed Gary Coleman,” “Colonized Ectoplasmic Jar-O-Niggafish,” “Eddie Murphy Golden Child Hat”—give $ilk space to flesh out these demented little worlds. That brazenness is sometimes a double-edged sword—the opening of “S.F.C.S.S.S.$ (P.a.a.M.F.)” dwells a little too long on his rationale for “call[ing] bitches bitches” before deflecting altogether—but his ability to make you laugh, think, and stew in cathartic rage through the chaos is consistently entertaining.
If $ilk is a bowling ball crashing his way through these hallucinogen-laced thoughts, then Harlem-born producer and longtime collaborator Kahlil Blu is the bumper keeping him from sliding into the gutter. Blu produced all of Imma Just Drop, and his beats match the hectic variety of $ilk’s raps with outsized flair. “I Ate 14gs of Mushrooms” and “Cuummoney Amiliani” blend hazy sample work with crystal-clear drums and synths to compound two different but equally epic sounds into psychedelic rocket fuel. “One Glazed” lets a guitar lick simmer in the background of what sounds like 808 Mafia trying their hand at drum’n’bass. “A Visit From the Giant Portal Wizard Snake” and “Jodi Don’t Love Me No Mo :-(” settle into intoxicating sampled chops and loops, while “Emmm, Nigga You Is Tasty >:)” turns a whir of sampled hand drums and flutes into an audible seance. Both Blu and $ilk are at their most uninhibited on “Tasty,” $ilk’s growing anger over connections between slavery, the music industry, and Black death dovetailing perfectly with the syncopated madness of Blu’s sample. No matter what he’s served, $ilk never trips up, barreling through every beat with purpose.
$ilk is living through the same disheveled, surreally racist society as the rest of us, and the emphasis he places on rapping his way through the madness is jaw-dropping. Wordy, thoughtful raps have thrived over the last decade, but they rarely feel this urgent or wired, as though he were snapping out of a drug-induced dream and trying to commit it all to paper before it fades from memory. $ilk has nothing but contempt for the rap industry at large, but he still cares deeply about craft and intent. He says as much on the second half of “One Glazed,” where he raps that putting all his competitors on notice is his duty: “This a hard task but it came with a tool, like a hard hat/It’s all facts; you ain’t slept on, lil nigga, your fuckin’ song’s wack!”
Structurally, Imma Just Drop isn’t much different from $ilk’s earlier projects, like 2019’s equally wildly titled G.T.F.O.M.D: There’s Not Enough Room for All You Motha Fuckas to Be On It Like This or 2020’s Attack of the Future Shocked, Flesh Covered, Meatbags of the 85. But Imma Just Drop is looser and burns more intensely, pressing $ilk’s love for pop-culture references, Black self-actualization, and blunted conversations with floating planet chunks into a tab of potent rap music—and rap is just his side gig. As long as the music hits like this—and is willing to rip listeners out of their chairs and punt their brains across the room—there’s really no reason to fix what isn’t broken.
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