Album Review: Junkie in the Sun by Deante’ Hitchcock
The Riverdale rapper fills his third LP with everything he wants and can’t have. It packs petty wishes next to existential terror and dares you to sort them.
The songwriting in Deante’s third LP reaches for something it cannot close its hand around, wanting, just wanting drives everything. He wants his mother not to pass away, wants to do a song with J. Cole, wants some head on the side, wants to be a decent big brother, and wants fresh Rihanna music. Not one of them comes in first. Nothing here asks you to treat one seriously over another; the existential and the petty sit together. From Riverdale, Georgia (Clayton County, south of Atlanta), Hitchcock is thirty-three; he had intended a trilogy with producer Brandon Phillips Taylor, Good in 2016, Better in 2020, then Best. Instead he called this one Junkie in the Sun.
All but one of the tracks were produced by Phillips Taylor on the same emotional frequency—warm. From the same root system, soul-vocal samples, jazz-touched percussion, even the gospel harmonies on the closer feel seem to have developed. In that warmth, Hitchcock’s conversational delivery excels. One producer across almost every song also means the tonal range has to come from the writing; when the writing coasts, the production cannot save it. The party joints and the love songs merge into one another. The one outside beat hardly shows as a change.
Wanting life in his eyes two bars before wanting people to stop calling him Dante, wanting to prove himself and then turning to a third-person aside about his brother, the title track runs “I just wanna” lines for an entire verse with an astonishing range of wants. Assumed he would want to travel far, they got him a car; “But maybe he was here before on the low, and this go around, he just tired of chasing.” That line reverses the whole inventory; the presumption that everyone wants what you want for them falls apart. “Funny Thing” stacks ironies in an anaphora hook, “The funny thing about the truth is everybody lie/The funny thing about this life is everybody die,” and the verses beneath are deadpan about it. He had money, battled his brother in the street, shook hands afterward, praised God for good lungs, and then smoked. Then a sequence separates itself, running from “Fuck niggas ain’t supposed to ride” through “Governments ain’t supposed to lie” and “Hummingbirds ain’t supposed to fly” to “My granddaddy wasn’t supposed to die/I’m feeling like they can break the rules, nigga, then so can I,” and the logic is stupid and airtight at once. On “Smile You’re on Camera,” the hook alone covers cancer, psychosis, grandma’s dinner, war and famine, and Hitchcock asks himself mid-verse, “Do I matter outside my work?”
The heaviest writing comes from “Almost There,” which spent two verses on cracked phones, IRS problems, and arguing with his girlfriend about money. The kind of stress that sounds ordinary until verse three arrives and he’s sitting with a .45:
“Sittin’ here with this .45 like I could end it all
Phone full of contacts with no friends to call”
He catches his own reflection in the mirror and the voice splits, one side calling himself stupid, useless, the other asking why he won’t spend time with his son, calling him selfish, telling him “You said you’d make it out, but you can’t do that if you dead.” He writes both sides of that argument and lets neither one win. “The Cycle” is even sicker. Verse one narrated getting shot on a walk to the store, from the perspective of dying—bleeding out, wondering if he’s already dead. Verse two flipped to the shooter, high on a pill, mama calling and getting declined, squeezing the trigger at everything in sight. Both verses end asking the same thing, whether the other person died, whether they died themselves, “’Cause either way, man, really, how would I know?” Neither side knows if the other survived. That kind of writing just needs a pen and the nerve to stay in the room.
The Eve/apple bar on “U-N-I” has been written a hundred times, and Phillips Taylor gives it a bed so pleasant it evaporates on contact. “Dance with Me” opens with “Ladies and pimps, naysayers and simps.” Wrong album. “Grass Greener” buries its one keen line (“Hakuna matata don’t mean you outta the race”) under piñata metaphors. “Heaven On Earth” focuses on affirmations so general they could be cross-stitched on a throw pillow at HomeGoods. An identity list simply expresses what has already been established after songs corralled from inside a shooting. Four rounds on fatherhood thin out, but “Reminders” gathers Hitchcock, Childish Major, and 6LACK for fatherhood songs (Major raps about a Grammy off “NISSAN ALTIMA,” while pushing his partner’s whip). The ones he neglected to mention are the ones that really matter.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Almost There,” “The Cycle,” “Funny Thing”