Album Review: KennyV by Serengeti

Holding a Salisbury steak like a rotary phone one minute and streaming his fits to a chat the next, Serengeti’s Kenny Dennis makes the funniest, saddest writing of his run.

Courtesy of CC King.

Kenny Dennis is a sixty-something, deep-fried, real estate lawyer from the South Side of Chicago—passionate about the Bears, mad about the Cubs, and unashamedly dedicated to “drip.” He’s married to a steady partner named Elaine and in love with a woman named Jueles, who supposedly died in a plane crash in ‘93. David Cohn, better known as Chicago MC Serengeti, has been rapping as the alter ego for over a decade; here, he hands him a cell phone and a livestream. Kenny talks into the “chat,” reading comments, showing off his fits to a room full of trolls and fans, letting the stream run as the women on either side of thirty years tear at him from off-screen. His voice stays nasal, blunt, less singing than speaking, the rhymes locking up like deadbolts as the train of thought derails.

In “STINGER”—Kenny’s long single verse where he trades bars with his own memory while driving along Lake Shore Drive—Elaine appears amid grocery bags. She’s built him “a whole cathedral out of coupons and some space,” comes home in the winter with exact change for the rent, the devotion he calls “No fireworks, nah, more like heating vents.” Jueles, however, weighs nothing. She walks back into a Portillo’s counter thirty years after the plane crash she never took, and Kenny almost drops the chili cheese. He can tell that “JUST TURN YOU BACK ON HOW YA BEEN” comes off to the chat as “Chat would say KD’s done crashing out.” He takes her with him anyway, second-guessing his decision from the passenger seat of a winter Grand Prix while she sleeps with one hand resting on his chest. In the freezer aisle later on that song, he’s “stunned and alone,” holding “banquet Salisbury steak like a rotary phone,” then it’s Portillo’s downtown again, him watching Jueles walk slowly through the lunch rush under the fluorescent lights until his knees buckle.

The disparity is the substance of “ELAINE LOVES MOVIES,” beyond quoting Tarkovsky, while he quotes Bo Jackson stats, where she calls an explosion “a symbol for pain,” labels a patch of wallpaper “emotional decay,” continues the letterbox “longer than CVS receipts,” and he eats M&Ms waiting on the mobsters in suits. Watching with her makes him feel smart for one moment and “dumb when I’m missing the point” the next. He rides the brown line in New Balance, reading essays at ten in the morning, trying to catch up. The longing gets more raw on the “DEGREES TO PEOPLE” hook, where he wonders if “Elaine’s still single” and if he’ll ever understand an Orson Welles shot the way she can. By the time the hook is over, the pain has started running-it’s chasing him, beating him up, coming back again.

On “TACO BELL RACING JACKET,” Kenny constructs himself out of objects-—“not real gold, but spiritually expensive” necklace, “Casio calculator worn by a real nerd,” the aforementioned title racing jacket, Oakley shades, New Balance 990s worn for his walk of fame, a pile that turns into evidence of the person until he’s insisting “I’m him, I’m him.” The song shifts; halfway in, Earl Lane informs him that Stallone wrote First Blood, that Rocky arrived when he had his last dollar, was about to give up and take up boxing training. “Just ‘cause you tried doesn’t mean you’re gonna go to the top,” he tells him, then in plainer terms, “Sometimes you gotta calm down, grab a bucket and mop, and go to work.” Each patch on that jacket stands in for a year he persisted while the Oscar went elsewhere.

Online, Kenny plays at being a streamer, opening “YO CHAT!” with “lookin’ grainy” feed, bragging about drip “so advanced, it concern the youth,” fielding a DM from Shaq (“Boom, let’s lock in”), and closing with “No cap, no rap, in peace to Bob Saget.” He plays neediness for laughs, even as he lets the feeling sting: “I got drip from grief, style from pain.” The audience’s reaction shifts quickly to judgment: On “W CHAT GANG,” Jueles comes home with “two shoppin’ bags of limited edition Dior,” takes one glance at the man in his sixties camping overnight for collabs and asks, “Kenny, you’re sixties, why you dressin’ like this,” calling it pathetic as chat types “W fit.” Elaine reacted differently. Smiling from the kitchen door, she’d call him cute, “not cute though warm way,” and photograph him like a movie star even when he wore a tiger-print beret. One person loved him, and the rest just liked the clothes.

Kenny respects the unfamous, and “HEY CHAT” gives him a 1980s Chicago of “third string linebackers, bullpen relievers with mustaches and divorce energy,” a Bears punt returner whose name he’s forgotten but who “called the appetizers snack trays,” a Benny the Bull who moved “like he knew where hidden money was.” He had once met a benchwarmer Bull in Ventura who “had seekh kebabs and bought a toaster oven,” and the encounter “changed my whole understanding of fame.” The underlying contrast is obvious: Back then, a professional might be filling his gas tank without an entourage or a chaperone; now everyone is too curated, “living through the playback” as he puts it on “LSD SUNSET.” That song works the same Chicago seam from a more hazy perspective: lemon ice at the Taste by Buckingham Fountain, an animatronic gorilla that startled children at a 2003 Rainforest Cafe, Harry Caray’s final game at Wrigley. The crowd holds up their phones as a foul ball comes soaring, and it’s caught on a hundred tiny screens, not in mid-air.

And then there’s the 3 AM gas station of “KENNY CONSPIRE” comes at you, Kenny at pump three at 79th observing a guy eating sunflower seeds before ten duplicate newscasters, who are all saying believe me. One president, he asserts, “died in a way that don’t stay dead,” and just gets “updated overnight like an app,” that no one has consented to receive updates for. A grandmother’s voice on FaceTime returns too clean, too fast, as if already loaded. Kenny says America forgot “how to render sadness in low resolution.” He has come to the conclusion that his smoke alarm is chirping out of spite and that the fireworks outside could be drones signaling a blank event.

Jueles maneuvers the rental car with both hands on the wheel through “IWTSIYWL”; the stream has live polling throughout and 52% of the viewers are for “return to Elaine”, one user comments “Elaine deserve better” to 1000 likes while the mods are failing to remove it; Rhino has passed away, leaving Kenny “all emotional” and admitting he misses Elaine “already, ain’t even gone a damn day” next to the woman he abandoned her for. He has asserted he hasn’t changed and “STILL HIM” where this is most apparent; his friends keep appearing through a stream of names—Bloodsport, the Oakbrook gym; Die Hard, the Jewel; his Slayer t-shirts, his Chrome Hearts jeans; friends who have died—until the words blend together and the connection is lost. It is rendered simply and flatly, never stopping to articulate, left behind on a glowing cell phone beneath a Budweiser sign on West Jennings, past midnight.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “STINGER,” “KENNY CONSPIRE,” “LSD SUNSET”