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Joey Badass – Amerikkkan Idol

Thirteen tracks from a Brooklyn rapper's angriest record — released, deliberately, on the fourth of July.

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Joey Bada$$: ALL-AMERIKKKAN BADA$$ (2017)

Joey Bada$$ arrived as a teenager with a nineties-revivalist aesthetic, rapping over dusty boom-bap beats with a technical facility that made comparisons to the previous generation inevitable. This album is where he stopped being a revivalist.

The production moves towards soul and funk, the hooks get bigger, and the subject becomes explicitly political. The three Ks in the title are not decoration; the record is a sustained argument about American racism, released on Independence Day, by an artist who had previously been praised mainly for his technique.

Not all of it lands. But its ambition to be a protest album in a commercial format — at a moment when very few mainstream rappers were making one — is why it still matters.

What to listen for

"LAND OF THE FREE" is the centrepiece and was released as a single on the day of the 2017 presidential inauguration, which tells you the intent.

"DEVASTATED" is the biggest record here and the most melodic thing he had made to that point — a genuine pop song from an artist who had been resisting them.

"LEGENDARY" with J. Cole is the best guest verse on the album and one of Cole's sharpest.

"BABYLON" with Chronixx is the reggae collaboration, and it connects the album's argument to a much older tradition of using Babylon as a name for the state.

"ROCKABYE BABY" with ScHoolboy Q is the hardest track, and "SUPER PREDATOR" with Styles P takes its title from a phrase used about Black teenagers in nineties American politics.

"RING THE ALARM" brings in his Pro Era collective, and "Y U DON'T LOVE ME? (MISS AMERIKKKA)" is the album's argument in its most compressed form.

"Survivors Guilt" closes the set and is the most personal thing here.

Go deeper

1999 (2012) is the mixtape that made his name and the purest expression of the revivalist phase; B4.DA.$$ (2015) is the debut album.

The Pro Era collective is the wider context, and Capital STEEZ — its co-founder, who died in 2012 — is a figure worth reading about to understand the group.

Why it matters more than it lands: not every track holds, and the album is stronger as a statement than as a sequence. But making a sustained protest record in a commercial format, at a moment when very few rappers with his audience were attempting one, is the reason it still gets played — and the reason the release date was chosen rather than assigned.

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