Album Review: BLACK ASS KUNG-FU FLICK by Mick Jenkins & greenSLLIME
Jenkins and greenSLLIME trade Chicago blocks across a concise, cohesive collaborative effort of South Side specificity. The best underground rap collaboration in years.
Chicago’s underground rap circuits have been feeding off the same handful of producers and sparring partners for years now, and every so often, two of them lock into the same room and stop environing. greenSLLIME had been putting out South Side street records blunt enough to leave marks, rapping and producing with equal disregard for polish; Mick Jenkins, a decade removed from The Water[s], kept sharpening his pen without ever punching through to the audience his writing merited. The two had been crossing paths on loosies and guest spots for years—greenSLLIME produced Jenkins’s “Percy” back in 2019, appeared on Elephant in the Room—and BLACK ASS KUNG-FU FLICK is the full commitment to what those scattered collaborations hinted at. The title borrows from blaxploitation and martial-arts mythology, and the record itself has its feet planted on asphalt, a Chicago album down to the block names.
greenSLLIME and Jenkins rap from opposite ends of the same neighborhood. On “White Belts in the Way,” greenSLLIME goes first and does not flinch. Fiends heating spoons by moonlight, fifty shots aimed at squad cars, a funeral where the pastor didn’t cry because the deceased had been reckless since childhood. He sells pillows out front of Obama’s crib in Hyde Park. He threatens sarcophagi. Jenkins follows with “I know my pen best a sword, they barely beating pencils/Ballpoint like we fenced off,” a triple-stacked bar that turns a ballpoint into a blade, a fencing match, and a property line in the same breath. Where greenSLLIME drops an address and a body count, Jenkins packs three ideas into a single sentence and trusts you to catch up. They never meet in the middle, and they don’t need to.
“Tai Chi” opens with greenSLLIME remembering fried okra on the low end, lake breeze, children yelling on granny’s block, and the pistol in Eleanor’s third drawer. He invokes Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, claims his Native American name is Smokes with Bitches, and recounts the first time he saw snow through a hole in his roof that he spun into an excuse to rock gold in his tooth. Jenkins answers with Slytherin references, a 1967 car he calls art, Belgian Malinois, and intellectual property in the carpool lane. They are circling the same questions about legacy and Chicago and staying alive long enough to pass something down, but speaking two entirely different dialects to get there. “Vincennes” pushes further. greenSLLIME pins 115th and Vincennes, where they pump rock. R.I.P. Mikey, who had the jump shot. His killer is locked up, and now they’re after his grandmother, who was burned down her crib. Killed Jajuan in front of his kids. He moves through Kool-Aid coolers, stolen chocolate milk, jumping out of school windows, and an OG’s dice-roll philosophy. His answer to that philosophy: “Fuck it, I’m controlling the heist/And if they kill me, I’ll come back and blow at ‘em twice.” Jenkins responds on the same track with “We ain’t mocking movies, all these words is documentary/Speak like Spock, that’s not really your energy.”
A Black Dynamite sample kicks off “Creamed Corn” with “We’re Black Dynamite! I sell drugs in the community.” Jenkins raps about bread puns and Pret A Manger, schools without accreditation, the free commune of Christiania as a stand-in for chosen blood. Then he slows down. “He hugged the block before he loved his father/He washed his hands before he hugged his mother/New pots and pans before he did the dishes.” Three lines that lay out the entire order of operations for a kid who learned the corner before he learned affection, who scrubbed off the street before touching his family, who acquired kitchen tools before he even cleaned the ones already in the sink. They sit between a line about cutting trees and one about building bridges, and the gap between those images tells you everything about what the block costs and what it teaches. greenSLLIME picks up the second verse by putting you inside the trenches with grape Swishers, a missing judge, twelve-year-olds who already know your chain is fake. Jenkins’s compressed grief and greenSLLIME’s flat catalog of the same neighborhood make the song feel two-sided without ever becoming a conversation. They are staring at the same wreckage from different heights.
The kung-fu and blaxploitation framing flares up hardest on “Basically,” where greenSLLIME announces he could beat Jackie Chan and Jet Li before sliding into meat cleavers, deep freezers, and four ounces for a Bieber meeting. Jenkins goes rapid-fire on “Basically” too with “My wrist, my chick, my check, my neck, handsome/No face, no case, don’t play, won’t pay ransoms,” a flex cadence that keeps its fists clenched. The martial arts references are there for atmosphere, not architecture. They describe a stance more than a story. “Iron Lungs” takes that stance into stranger ground. greenSLLIME calls himself a neighborhood hero fighting gentrification whose superpower is home invasion, cites Steve Biko, dubs himself “Guwop Mandela,” then admits he’s tired of kids dying and mothers crying before recounting the first time he robbed somebody and the getaway car wouldn’t start. He had to run into the dark and toss his partner the gun. That memory sits under all the bravado and political name-checking, and it’s the most honest moment on the track. Jenkins follows with Tony Stark comparisons and Phil Harden stepbacks, lighter on his feet, playing in a different register while still hitting hard. The two of them sustain this balance across the whole album, and it never tips.
Conductor Williams drops his tag on “Iron Lungs” and gives greenSLLIME and Jenkins one of the album’s hardest floors to work on, a clipped soul loop with drums that crack without crowding. The rest of the production, much of it handled by greenSLLIME himself, stays spare and mid-tempo, built for density of language rather than density of sound. On “Jungle,” where Jenkins talks tithes and Godiva butter toffee and submarine pressure, the beat opens up between the kick and the sample chop and lets his imagery fill the space. greenSLLIME delivers the album’s most gut-level promise on “Jungle” too, addressed to a fourteen-year-old who caught a life sentence: “You never coming home, but you ain’t gon’ die alone/I smuggle the truth till that shit overflow and crumble the walls.”
Jenkins is at his most playful and precise on “Not Guilty,” flipping CBD into CPD in the span of a bar. “CBD can’t get a honor roll/CPD was on me, got away.” One abbreviation is a wellness product, the other is the Chicago police, and both fail him for different reasons, stitched into a single couplet without any pause to explain the joke. greenSLLIME opens the same track planting his own seeds and growing his own trees, keeping it domestic and agricultural before revealing his neighbors robbed his mama, so he shot back. The album closes with “STFU,” and Jenkins’s hook doubles as the album’s final instruction: “And all you had to do was shut the fuck up.” greenSLLIME spends his verse on RICO as the real kryptonite, Gaddafi rockets, COINTEL, relapse economics, snipers on the rooftop. Jenkins closes out talking about walking his shit, buying his own product with cash, Dame Dash energy, and growing up hitting stains on shopping window panes. The command to be quiet isn’t a warning to snitches alone. It’s a philosophy of motion without announcement, work without advertisement, the kind of discipline the kung-fu title promised from the jump.
The album’s first track, “Kaiju,” already settles the question of audience. greenSLLIME calls out Gordon Parks, Larry Hoover, David Barksdale, Chief Malik, and tells the chief of police to read and weep. Jenkins cracks dawn, catches worms, whips biscuits, and emulsifies. “Read everything I ever wrote, you’d never quote a line,” he says, equal parts boast and dare. This is one of the strongest underground rap collaborations in recent memory, and the Jenkins-greenSLLIME dynamic gives the album a genuine push-pull energy that most duo records never find.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Creamed Corn,” “Vincennes,” “STFU”