The English written companion of Fake For Real: since 1997, reviews and articles about rap music

KODAK BLACK - Back For Everything

Albums

KODAK BLACK - Back For Everything

Few medias will tell you the truth. Not many will say that Back For Everything is one of the best albums released so far in 2022. Not because of their bad taste, or their lack of discernment. No. They just decided not to talk about this personage, infamously known for unqualifiable sexual assaults. Actually, a few critics acknowledged that Kodak Black was important, that he can't be totally ignored. But they remain careful. They aren't praising him too much, or too loud.

KODAK BLACK - Back For Everything

Oh, true, they are praising others, like the older and more established rapper who recently triumphed at the Super Bowl, despite being notoriously known for his past misbehavior with women. "Too big to fail" is a universal principle, it is not only about big companies. But Kodak Black is not such a big fish: so he's been targeted by the cancel culture, even though he is, by far, one of the greatest of today.

Ten years have passed since Kodak Black started, and on this fourth official album, he says he is back. As a matter of fact, he never really left. His stay in prison was shortened by Trump. He delivered a few other projects in the last few years, like Bill Israel and Haitian Boy Kodak. And he was in the headlines just a few weeks ago, when someone shot him at a party organized by Justin Bieber. Nevertheless, with the success of "Super Gremlin", his single from the Sniper Gang compilation, Back For Everything looks like a comeback.

Its title says it clearly: this album is about resilience. It is also about the many wounds of a man, who confesses multiple times killing his pains with drugs, and who admits in the eponymous song that he is vulnerable to the treasons of his friends and mistresses. The rapper is still a figurehead for the gangsta rap blues popularized a while ago by Boosie, that ended up being a marker of rap music in the 2010's.

Back For Everything is a melancholic record, and a great album. Built with an impressive set of producers like Boi-1da, London on da Track, Murda Beatz, Zaytoven, BandPlay and Scott Storch - to mention just the notorious ones - it is made of quiet and smooth beats. Some are quite atmospheric. And on those, with only one guest – Lil Durk, another depressed street rapper – Kodak Black confides to us.

With his mutters and the pain in his voice, the Floridian talks about his misfortunes. The man who will remain his entire life the "project baby" that named two of his mixtapes, is both proud and ashamed for being locked in his own universe, a world made of opps and Glocks, like on the heartbreaking "Grinding All Season", or on "He Love the Streets". He sings about the hungry ones who have nothing, on the magnificent piano and flutes of "On Everything".

He shares long confessions on the delicate guitar of "Omega". With another guitar, on "Love Isn’t Enough", he delivers a desperate love song. On "Take Your Back", with Lil Durk, he urges a lover fed-up with his unfaithfulness to come back to him. As for the great "Super Gremlin", it is a lament about the end of his friendship with Jackboy, and the opportunity lost by them both to become superstars.

His blues, his distress, his resentment even, are also about the quasi-boycott he is suffering from. With the introductive "Let Me Know", Kodak Black says that he is too gangsta to be given a Grammy Award, and he complains that he lost to Khalid at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards, but he rejoices about his influence on Cardi B's "Bodak Yellow" hit single. He is the accursed artist, the unsung hero, the one people fail to celebrate as they should, but whose work, posterity and legend are already considerable. And this new well-rounded album, undeniably, will contribute to this.

Buy this album

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