Review: MIKE – weight of the world

Rappers like Michael Bonema (aka MIKE) – along with Navy Blue, his group Slums and the newly-laundered Earl Sweatshirt – reside in a group of their own, where lo-fi, experimental hip-hop productions meet bars that trickle off the tongue like water. Their music, subsumed in the opaqueness of smoke and warped soul-jazz, shares a common current: dejected, flattened, yet glowing with cautious optimism in the face of seemingly-ineradicable oppression.

weight of the world arrives in the wake of crises both universal (the COVID pandemic, the George Floyd protests) and personal (the death of Bonema’s mother last year). Almost exclusively self-produced (with a few tracks by multi-instrumentalist KeiyaA), the record runs through lush, screwed samples with an unceasing momentum matching the stream-of-consciousness raps that MIKE is known for. 

Quite frankly, this might be his most inviting record yet on a track-by-track basis. KeiyaA’s productions in general are fantastic matches for MIKE’s verbal assault, if the dark, moody cyclone of “222” and the chaotic rotation of horns on “get rich quick scheme” are any indication. But DJ Blackpower (MIKE’s beat-making alias) also makes just as powerful an impression here as he’s done since War In My Pen, providing intensely melancholic vibes to songs like “love supremacy” and “coat of many colors”. Consistency is MIKE’s secret weapon, and everything on weight of the world carries that weight while retaining an undercurrent of plainspoken beauty just based on the hues of the samples he uses. Everything here is so dense, so packed with words and images that it practically demands repeat listens.

That’s nothing new for MIKE, whose precarious flow, mumbled words and tightly-packed lines often feel like you’re crossing the folds in his brain. On weight of the world, his musings are searingly current, with clear mentions of the ongoing pandemic and line after line reflecting grief for his loss. That grief seems to haunt the entire record, with a looming nexus in its title track, itself a remix of its first announced single with an appended intro. Though the track may be livelier than what MIKE is known for, that resolution comprises only half of the verse, which is alternately reminiscent and elegiac. Elsewhere, the two-part “what’s home” pairs brooding beats with a statement of artistic confidence that’s counterbalanced by a ruthless assessment of prioritized self-preservation; “plans” sees Bonema having fun with a looped sample and some tricky time signatures; “alert*” feels like an encapsulation of all the terrible news we’re faced with on the daily.

Even the recent ripping of racial wounds surfaces here, explicitly in Earl Sweatshirt’s MIKE-drop of a verse on the abruptly-ended “allstar”. On that verse, Earl is as lucid in his intentions as MIKE but goes a step further, pulling no punches as he documents, with blazing clarity, the necessity of a movement against police brutality and the insidious forces that would actively suppress it. It feels like a transmission from another planet, a jamming signal that ends as soon as it starts, leaving the listener with a brief moment of silence before its time to hit the streets again. It’s moments like this that make weight of the world feels, well, weighty, but the overall mood is still strangely soothing, a blessing from a rapper operating at peak capacity.