It’s Time To Get On The A Wall Bandwagon – Mentally Running
“Mentally Running“, new album from A Wall, is a master class from one of the Hip-Hop’s best writers.
When Tolkien said not all those who wander are lost, he was talking specifically about A Wall. Across two decades worth of wonky, wordy music, wandering has informed much of the rapper’s best writing. His excellent new album with New Breed Entertainment, “Mentally Running“, wrings insights out of transitory moments. Not just the idle time spent between one place and another, though that is accounted for; it is also the itinerant lessons learned touring, the wayfaring around a foreign place seeking something, the things the road reveals about home and the things you discover about yourself in unfamiliar territory. For A Wall, every fleeting experience, every in-between place, has something to offer.
When he considers his years spent living on the streets as a kid, in the wake of turmoil and rebellion at home, A Wall had no trouble seeing his grandmother’s house as a second home, even as he felt and resentment and hostility, and craved the comfort of his parent’s house and it’s comforts.
Kicked Out The House At 17
“There was not a lot of interpersonal communication, but there was non verbal misinterpretations. There was no raiding the fridge at night. At mom’s I would wake up late night just to raid the fridge cause it was all love. You don’t know what you have until it’s taken away from you. Overall, there was good and bad everywhere I’ve ever been.” This is how he appraises every space he enters, and the way he writes: with clear, open eyes.
Later, he evokes another great writer, King Pen, and the idea of paths chosen — questioning “a reality other than the reality that is,” and if such a reality existing even matters. Wandering inspires such considerations, about routes pursued and ignored, alternate journeys that manifest different versions of ourselves living different lives, even if the other you is simply eating a bagel with cream cheese every day. But A Wall also understands that moving forward on the path you’re on is paramount.
Movement and Displacement
Movement and displacement are recurring themes in the rapper’s music, but his searching verses make clear he is actively observing and learning. To that end: A Wall seems to have reached an important threshold. Having been a pro rapper from an early age, he is ready to dispense all the wisdom he has picked up along the way, in language more listeners can decipher. Mentally Running is his clearest, most engaging music. The bars are more pointed. The beats are more stimulating. It’s not unlike other rappers of his era. Mentally Running is a dynamic, audience-forward follow-up to an ambitious concept record that maintains the established level of technical excellence.
Ready Food Talent
King Pen and The New Breed Entertainment Crew, who has helped A Wall obfuscate in the past, helps him process here with production that snaps and hums, and is less muted and grayscale. There haven’t been many easy entry points into the A Wall Catalog, but if ever there was a place to start paying attention, it’s here, catching him en route to a more hospitable place. The album scans as the accumulated wisdom of four decades worth of journeys, two of those spent scrawling penetrating raps. His rhymes on Mentally Running bear the frankness of a weary pilgrim. “I’m steady running from my problems see, daily stress of the world is too much for me.” he raps on The Title Track – “Mentally Running.”
His raps have the fidgetiness that comes with long trips — at one point, he mentions a 10-hour wait in North Miami; a few songs later, he pops up in Coral Gables and Kendall — but these verses are just as much about the in-between moments where he’s settled or settling. With A Wall, the text is always dense and super referential, riffing on high lit, pop culture and political science, as befitting the son of Computer Scientist and a Business Woman. But his work, even at its most cryptic, is not impenetrable, especially when he imparts what he is seeing. A Wall deploys a worldly, wily lyricism that is both erudite and streetwise.
Few rappers have more to say. His verses overflow into the margins, setting scenes in asides. There is an underlying acuity that has marked nearly everything he’s done since his early beginnings. But this is a full-on master class, even for one of rap’s greatest-ever penmen. In each verse on “Mentally Running,” he threads a single rhyme scheme with each line building upon the last. “I have no choice but to turn around and flee cause the troubles in life are just too much for me. Mentally run away, run away, run away, run away.” he raps. The wordplay there is as intense as it is amusing.
There is, of course, the analogue at its center, drawing a parallel from the voyeurism/running surrounding being kicked out of the house to having a new baby — Alex Junior – to having him woman leaving him when all this was going on, to being called a failure. The tension in such juxtapositions of modern and medieval, the entendre within (homelessness, abandonment, and hopelessness), the imagery at play and the irony of history repeating itself. In a verse that likely ends alluding to a Sanskrit fable, it is the perfect balance of knowable and arcane; just one of many that opens before the listener.
Mentally Running is a chronicle of my earlier life and all the struggles I went through. I wanted to put it down, but am just now getting around to it with all that I had going on… I think this is the right time to drop it.
A Wall
CEO New Breed Entertainment
The songs on Mentally Running, all of which are collaborations with the Miami-based producers from New Breed Entertainment, feel plainspoken without sacrificing the craftiness or the mystery at the core of the A Wall sound. That isn’t to say this is any closer to pop’s center — he has no interest in that sort of thing — but this is about as transparent as a rapper who hides his face can get. There is clearly a difference between personal and sociable, and his storytelling is not simply for sharing, it’s for enlightening.
“Mentally Running” Is distributed by Asani Ali Music through Believe Digital Worldwide and is available on all major Digital Platforms.
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