Album Review: Inspire Your Idols by Vic Spencer
The South Side rapper who once handed Chance the Rapper’s number around Chicago has spent fifteen years quietly buying back the silence.
Inside the Save Money orbit around 2011, before Acid Rap turned a Hyde Park teenager into a national name, the rapper passing Chance’s contact information to local producers was a South Side veteran already five albums deep. Victor Terrell Spencer was thirty by then, born in 1981 in a group home on the East Side, calling himself “The Rapping Bastard.” The student left the gatekeeper standing on the curb. Spencer kept working. Psychological Cheat Sheet one through six with August Fanon, an Iron Wigs side-project with Verbal Kent and SonnyJim, VicTree with Tree, Blessed with Chris Crack, and so many others. Inspire Your Idols lands on his own label, short and sweet, and writing that has only gotten better over time.
On “Amazon Trucks On Spokes,” Lil Kydd’s warped sample gives way to a chilled boom-bap loop and Spencer enters behind the beat. “Penmanship been on point like I’m standin’ up on a pyramid,” he says, then turns the boast inside out: “These rappers never gon’ be good at this/Sell your home equipment to me since you not gon’ be as good as this.” Clean sneakers come out of an Amazon truck. Blunts get wrapped on Invincibles. The closing threat feigns the punchline: “The big boom that was meant for you/Next time I won’t miss, motherfucker, that was my gift to you.” One word follows, deadpan, alone (“Shampoo”).
Yet the violence on this record could be called furniture, and the head count looks the part. Stabbings on “You a Goofy,” “Take the chains off your neck, then I feed you the pits,” knives to the ribcage, aluminum bats, gun-barrel smoke on “Come Thru On Point,” fajita blunts sparked off dead opps in “Buried Half Dead.” But “I just rather punch niggas, we rather jump niggas/Rather pump niggas, we rather stomp niggas” runs deep in multiple passages—a man bored at his own menu.
Detroit battle veteran Marv Won walks into “Buried Half Dead” the way he walks into a cypher, already winning. His guest verse rides relaxed over August Fanon’s crunching beat: “All drinks is on the house, you blew it, red is my favorite color/Beat you purple ’til the bruises stop swelling.” Internal rhyme compressed into single bars. Present-participle attack. No setup. Spencer answers Won in the opposite direction, slowing the tempo with a four-word fragment of his own: “And Victor will leave ‘em starving.” Then he piles up the kind of image Marv Won won’t reach for: “I use your bones to write past the margins, sparking fajita blunts.” Spencer raps cheetah pumps, while Won raps cheap diners.
You may hear Roc Marciano with the influence. But the hunger is Sean Price, in whose room Spencer’s deadpan was earned on Imperius Rex in 2017, two years before Price died. Unlike Marciano, who narrates heists already finished, Spencer narrates the afternoon in between them. “I’m at Harold’s with the six-piece and peach knee-high” on “Happy Hour” rides Jay Chat’s sampled chops and a voice talking about honesty in plainspoken speech. Halfway through that song, the most Sean Price moment Spencer has ever recorded arrives as a spoken aside, like one of Price’s “P!” tags: “You ever, like, realize that people really do not fuck with you? I think it’s ‘cause I speak my mind and I don’t care.”
Out on the lakefront on “Tropical Smoothie from 71st,” Spencer is posted at the Atlantic Ocean catching a black crappie. Eucalyptus kisses for his baby run a couple hundred bucks every visit. Sebb Bash’s weeping electric guitar bends toward a Teddy Pendergrass sample, warmer than anything else on the record. “I ain’t been proud enough for myself/I came a long way and zero hours of help” is the bravest line on the album. The only one in which Spencer admits anything. Quiet now: “I’m a resilient kid/That’s beautiful, shit.”
Lil Kydd’s piano loop on “The Becomers” is fully drained by the halfway mark, even though Spencer earns the strongest single bar on the song: “Pick up a pen, nigga, or end up in the pen, nigga.” His authority gets dispersed across BlaQ Chidori on Cena and WWE, J Wade on burnt CDs, Aakeem Eshú on aggressive existence, Lil Kydd himself on selling crack behind the Red Snapper. Spencer’s own bar has to share air with four rising voices who haven’t put in his decade. Iron Wigs posse cuts on Your Birthday’s Cancelled in 2020 had Roc Marciano and Quelle Chris on them. Five-man posse cuts on a writer-driven album age faster than anyone wants to admit.
Over Jramacyde’s wobbling bass tone on “Weird Al Yankovic’s Weed Stash,” the furniture reading is finished: “I do homework without using Google” gives way to “Shit is very wicked and malicious/I challenge all of these rappers in various exhibitions.” Messiah Musik’s piercing horn loops chase the 44-year-old former gatekeeper of Chance the Rapper’s phone number through the year’s best mowing error on “Puncture Your Lungs”: “Ran your body over with a truck for fourteen days/And I ain’t even realize that was the half of a month.” A blunt gets wrapped, several rappers get bodied, the king leaves your face with a sting.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Amazon Trucks On Spokes,” “Buried Half Dead,” “Tropical Smoothie from 71st”