Review Summary: In My Mind, true to its name, ultimately fails to escape the trappings of BJ's own ambition. But the fact that it tries to heartily is worthy of praise.
In My Mind, the major-label debut of BJ the Chicago Kid, is an interesting release. BJ has made a name for himself primarily though his collaborations with other rising Chicago stars like Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa, but the telltale sonic cues of “new Chicago” are hardly seen as he vacillates between Motown style soul and Houston-via-Toronto style "rap." For an album from an artist with Chicago literally in his name, In My Mind is a strangely eclectic and stateless release.
Before we parse the rest of the album, let’s talk about “Church.” If “Church,” the album’s biggest single, was your first introduction to BJ, you’d be hard pressed to differentiate him from some of the other hardlessly AutoTuned “soul” singers that populate hip-hop/R&B radio. This song is definitely more direct than most of them, but it’s far from Weeknd levels of vulgarity. It’s perfectly innocuous and inoffensive, if not a little sweet, but far from memorable. And, thankfully for listeners, “Church” is a bit of a red herring. While BJ does return to the same tired old staples of modern R&B on a good number of tracks here, much of the album surprises in its level of experimentation.
But it takes a good while for that experimentation to really kick off. “Love Inside” and “Man Down” feel like slightly watered down versions of more popular songs, and BJ’s Jamie Foxx-lite vocals do little to truly elevate the songs. “The Resume” does a bit better, taking an AutoTuned choir (straight out of the Kanye playbook, and one of the Chicago things BJ does manage to bring to this album) and imbuing it with a degree of gospel pomp. It’s definitely not an original track, nor are the lyrics that good (“I want to work that body like it’s a 9-to-5”), but it fares better than the previous two tracks. The first truly good track comes with “Shine,” which shows an earnest and more emotive side of BJ that the paint-by-numbers “post-R&B” tracks that follow it stamp down in favor of marketability.
That point needs to be belabored a bit because it truly is important. In My Mind, for all its obviously workshopped parts, does possess a good deal of good tracks. “Wait Til The Morning,” while sounding a lot like a Trey Songz B-side, does at least sound impassioned and powerful in a lighters-out, stadium-filler kind of way. “Heart Crush” feels like something that James Fauntleroy would write, which is as good a complement as any new R&B singer-songwriter can receive at this point.
When things get truly interesting however is when he crosses over to the other extreme, eschewing slick future R&B altogether for schmaltzy retro-R&B tracks. “Jeremiah/World Needs More Love,” with its Kirk Franklin-lite gospel arrangement, is more than a bit sappy with its whole “I’m not talking about the singer, I’m talking about the prophet” shtick, but it at least seems more authentically BJ than “Church” and “Man Down” did. “The New Cupid” takes a turn towards doo-wop and boasts a characteristically good verse from Kendrick Lamar. Thankfully for BJ, K. Dot’s verse elevates the material just enough to escape the “oh, he tried” trappings that token genre revival music generally falls into, but just hearing an artist so invested in doo-wop of all things in 2016 is enough to win BJ a gold star. For now, at least.
The one instance where I can truly say without qualification that BJ’s experimentation with Motown-style R&B truly wows is on “Woman’s World,” which is a more faithful evocation of James Brown and Marvin Gaye than anything else I’ve heard in a while. It features the kind of emotion payoff that makes the prior excursions seem like necessary preparation, and stands heads-and-shoulders above the rest of the album’s tracks.
But, unfortunately, he follows this track with another generic radio-ready cut (“Crazy”) that again downplays his strengths as a vocalist to fit the “trap-soul” mold that radio demands. As a standalone track, it’s innocuous and innocent enough. But it’s truly heartbreaking when put up against some of BJ’s more fruitful retro-tangents just one or two tracks before. It kills the flow the album had built up, all in the service of “name one genius who ain’t crazy” style platitudes. “Home” fails to ignite as well, starting off with a clunky couplet (“I might not agree with everything that I understand but I understand”) that strives desperately to mimic the spoken word elements of better albums (“To Pimp A Butterfly” immediately comes to mind). As BJ continues talking without saying much (the sentiment is basically just “home is where the heart is”), any kind of goodwill his effort may have won him (“aww, he’s trying to be Kendrick!”) evaporates. It’s a shame because once the track starts in earnest, it’s good enough, with BJ taking a laidback guitar riff and doing vocal runs up and down it. It’s far from exciting, and his proclaimed love for Chicago is far from validated by the proceeding tracks, but it’s definitely not the worst track here.
And that sentiment sums up a lot of this album. BJ is definitely a talented singer, but he rarely lets himself truly shine as a vocalist. He’s not exactly a gifted lyricist, but he does have moments of brilliance (“Woman’s World,” “Shine”). Ultimately, he’s not escaped the trappings of his own ambitions, whether they’re his artistic ones (the rough experiments in retro-revival, the glorified showtunes) or his commercial ones.
But the fact that an artist can make these kinds of mistakes or show this kind of ambition on a major commercial project speaks well of the direction that R&B is going. For the last decade or so, R&B has been dominated by artists that are content to exist purely as carbon copies of their contemporaries. You’d be hard pressed to listen to the radio today and meaningfully distinguish the myriad of “singers” who use the same tired Mustard beats or half-assed “40” knockoff beats, making “mood music” that fails to inspire anything other than a pavlovian numbness. For every Weeknd or FKA twigs that pushes the envelope a bit, there’s a Tory Lanez or Bryson Tiller who pulls it back into the post-Drake ooze.
R&B historically has been a transgressive genre, one that gave voice to black Americans traditionally silenced or occluded from other genres. Artists like Marvin Gaye and Isaac Hayes made music that at least tried to inspire a wealth of feelings. It was music to dance to, to make love to, to get high to, and to protest to. It gave voice to black America in a way that rock couldn’t, or wouldn’t. And when hip-hop began to supplant R&B as that voice, R&B became increasingly indistinguishable from other genres. It began to take up the sonic cues of whatever genre became popular (remember how EDM became the go-to for R&B singers around 2009-2011?) To see artists like BJ the Chicago Kid fight the good fight and attempt to recall the more expressive elements of R&B is gratifying enough for this album to receive a good score. It may not be the perfect album or even a truly great album, but its very existence stands as something far more important than its parts or presentation indicate.
