Last Updated on December 14, 2022, 1:16 PM | Published: December 14, 2022
If the rap game is characterized by anything, it’s posturing.
The entire artform is seemingly built on the boasts, brags, and brashness of the artists themselves as they broadcast their superiority over others in the game, always maintaining a carefully overconfident image that can be remarkably difficult to establish as a young performer.
But what happens when life deals an artist enough blows that they can’t maintain that mask anymore? What happens when the reality of life is tragic, confusing, and challenging enough to trip up even the hardest, most confident rapper?
If there’s an answer to that question at all, it’s surely somewhere within “Grandma’s Boy,” the new full-length offering from OKC hip-hop lynchpin Rodrick Malone.
Written and recorded during a period of multiple close family and friend deaths, Malone says the album was “born from a lot of loss and pain.” But rather than fall prey to depression and nihilism, he focuses the themes here on questions somehow both universal and deeply personal: what makes a memory, and what’s the meaning of a memory if it can be so easily lost?
As a member of genre-defying rap collective Sativa Prophets, Malone is certainly no stranger to hip-hop experimentalism, and the choppy, hyper-modern distorted synths and crushing backbeats keep that stride, but the songs each frequently come up for air, with moments built in for the listener to catch their breath.
Malone’s persistently creative wordplay and lyrical flow is broken up frequently with a surprisingly vulnerable singing voice, heavily affected, swirling and echoing like the voice inside your head. Easy comparisons come to Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and to that “other” Malone, but here the effect feels more personal and warm, and when he uses that voice to yell, you feel it.
It’s safe to say that if you’ve dealt firsthand with the death of a parent or grandparent, or if you’ve watched someone you love lose themselves to dementia, you’ll feel everything the album has to offer.
Listening through the first time, I felt the themes were clear and the emotion and honesty were front and center, but I couldn’t put my finger on why Malone had chosen the title “Grandma’s Boy.”
Then I hit the title track late in the album and it was all suddenly pretty obvious.
The track features a woman, clearly advanced in her years, speaking candidly about the experience of her mind slipping away and her memories deserting her, sometimes not knowing how she got somewhere or even who she is. This is Juanita Balentine, Malone’s real grandmother, who was lost to dementia not long after the conversation that you hear.
“The clip of her singing at the end was recorded on Thanksgiving about a week before she passed,” Malone told me. “Crazy to hear someone with dementia become almost lucid and speak on her condition.”
As if that’s not enough for any one person to bear, sometimes tragedy gives way to tragedy.
He lost his father around the same time.
It’s not surprising, then, that the lyrical content of the album is as much a trip into Malone’s own youth and psychological history as it is a meditation on such weighty themes.
References to 90s pop culture abound in everything from pro wrestling stars Chris Benoit and Owen Hart (both of whom came to tragic ends of their own,) “Blue’s Clues,” “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” and even the Fleer brand of trading cards.
These are the things that stick in a young mind with a lifetime of absorbing fiction and media to help make sense of the same kind of unanswerable questions that “Grandma’s Boy” is asking. These kinds of pop cultural frames of reference are inevitable when looking back on memories tied to a person or a place or a younger, simpler time when you could sit on your grandmother’s floor in front of the television with only snacks and cartoon dogs to concern you.
The final track, “Last Year,” hits home on that wistful feeling with the only lyrics all variations on the line “gone are the days and the ways I used to love you.”
It’s not a lament for the end of love, but for the ability to love someone the way you once did. They might be gone, or they might be here but no longer completely.
When we mourn a person, we also mourn the places, the time periods, and even the memories in which they lived. That’s the central theme at the heart of “Grandma’s Boy.” It’s not a eulogy for all the people Malone has lost so much as it’s a trip back through the memories where they will all now live forever.
Being able to face that and speak about it all with such clarity, brutal honesty, and even humor is a feat of serious confidence and serious game.
No posturing required.
“Grandma’s Boy” by Rodrick Malone is available now on all streaming services.
Follow him on Instagram at @rodrickmalone.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
