Album Review: Pray 4 Me by Chris Patrick
A Def Jam debut built on rent panic, grief, and the grind’s diminishing returns. Pray 4 Me is the New Jersey rapper’s public reckoning with industry purgatory.
“Can’t even act like I’m good ‘cause
I just got a call from my dawg that our homie just died
Lowkey won’t even cry
Bank account not good enough to get back home if I tried.”
Chris Patrick starts his Def Jam debut, and it sounds like a collect call you don’t want to answer. Someone’s dead, he has a below-zero bank account balance, and he doesn’t know how to cry, not in a hard guy way, but in a worn-out way. The East Orange, New Jersey rapper has been ramping up to this release through EPs with From the Heart and The Calm, and of course, those freestyles on Gabe P’s On The Radar platform, showcasing his ability to keep up bars for several minutes at a time. But it doesn’t play like a highlight reel; rather, it’s proof of what happens when chasing the dream stops sounding like a cute attempt and starts to feel like a job you might get fired from.
The central tension at play over these nine songs is one that rarely gets expressed so explicitly in rap: the discrepancy between major-label-adjacency and actual financial security. Chris is not rapping about being ignored by the industry. He’s signed, he has a major-label deal, he’s been on tour. But the kind of success that he’s achieved so far looks is the kind nobody puts in music videos: advances dried up, royalty checks dwindling, credit cards maxed out, job hunting on Indeed while signed to a record label. On “Patience,” he confesses to having spent the last two weeks on a résumé, royalties dropping off each day, watching himself be erased from “up next” conversations. He’s not whining about not getting put on; he’s walking us through the series of indignities that come with being put on and having to struggle anyway.
It gets painfully specific. “Pull up in the house, stuck in the land, blew my advance/My tourin’ went rust, I fucked up the bag, I’m stuck on Indeed,” he raps, and worst of all: “Half all features ran for the sake of the rent, it’s impactin’ the brand.” That’s a bar about how struggling financially can degrade your artistic standards: you take features not because they make sense but because your landlord can't wait. On “Ausar’s Prayer,” he references how tours are going out and skipping his name because he’s “lacking accomplishments,” and shares that the label pushed back the project. These aren't vague gripes with the way the music business works; they're pain points that come from actually experiencing this brand of success.
The grind language is everywhere on Pray 4 Me, but it doesn’t read as hustle-mindset baiting. “Ramen Noodles” opens with a deflated air mattress on the floor of his cousin’s house and lays out a timeline that doesn’t really suggest overcoming adversity so much as sticking it out because you’re stubborn and this is the only dream you’ve got: 2021 signed, 2022 dropped, 2023 back home working part-time, 2024 getting flown out again. The chorus repeats that the only direction he can go in is up, but the verses are littered with ways down. He’s running laps until sunrise, eating cheaply. The refrain of “ramen noodles till the paper clear” sounds more like a man trying to talk himself into the sacrifice than a triumphant refrain about work ethic. Drum-wise, that record hits harder than almost anything else here, and sounds thick instead of nimble; the rhythm is in direct conflict with the single-mindedness required to continue grinding.
Where Chris’s writing sharpens most is when he’s addressing the dead. “Screaming at the Sky” is the emotional nucleus of the album, a single long verse addressed to his grandmother that never tries to make grief into a mantra. He keeps her obituary in the console of his car. He hasn’t cut his locks because she had locks, and putting his hands on his hair reminds him of putting his hands on hers. He rushes sleep in case his dreams offer a chance to talk to her. He reads Corinthians in hopes that it might indicate when she’s visiting him. These aren’t poignant details, but the specificities of keeping in touch with a person who has passed away. The verse ends with him asking her to watch over a dog that recently died, and the suggestion that she’s arguing with God about setting up a place for the family in heaven.
“Huncho’s Prayer” scales this up to a 9-minute runtime, and it’s the most ambitious track on the project. It’s a song about his friend getting knocked, robbery, kidnapping, attempted murder charges, and details how they met through a mutual friend, went on tour together, watched him try to stay out of trouble, and then describes the morning there was a knock at the door, and everything changed. He writes about the survivor’s guilt: “It’s the thought that when niggas win Grammys you’ll probably be watching that shit from the can/It’s the thought that if niggas die early, you can’t even slide through to bury your mans.” The near-mythical endurance of this song is sustained by oscillating between a removed narrative and an intimate direct address, and it justifies its length by not lingering on one episode or emotional mode too long. It’s the song on which he’s least preoccupied with being good at rapping and most focused on bearing witness.
But Pray 4 Me isn’t all grief and financial anxiety. There’s a different Chris Patrick on display here, the one who pops out on “The Mayor” and “Frankenstein,” chest puffed out and yelling at you about how much better he is than everyone else. “You niggas is motionless sacks of shit and I hate when y’all earn respect that y’all never deserve,” he begins “Frankenstein,” and proceeds to come for the rest of the those kinds of rappers, before MARCO PLUS matches and validates his energy with a verse full of threats and murder, concluding that he stands over opps like the apostrophe, and refers to himself and Chris as the prophecies. Chris and MARCO even sound similar on this huge-swinging Conductor Williams beat, so it functions as proof of assertion.
SWAVAY’s verse on “The Mayor” is like-minded. They’re both “standing on business,” repping their cities, and pulling up ready to do harm if they need to. He talks about 30/30 vision and how Chris helped him see clearly, and reflects on manifesting his current success. “Pray don’t nobody test my G” is a great refrain, but overall, they’re both stuck in the place of talking about having achieved a buzz level when they say, “Ain’t a place in the world that ain’t heard of me.” Chris is at his most memorable when he’s being hyper-specific and at his most anonymous when he’s talking shit in generalities.
The love song content here falls somewhere in between. “100x” pairs him with Amindi for a smooth duet about long-distance relationships and missing each other’s faces. He confesses to always being on a roll, only catching 24 hours here and there with this potential love interest before he’s gone again. It’s not necessarily accessible, in the sense that it’s not disabling to normal people who struggle to connect while following their dreams, but it is fairly specific to a rapper’s lifestyle of catching flights. Amindi’s verse matches his in theme: she’s also been on the road doing shows. “Doremi” is much goofier, organized around an earworm chorus about singing “dore mire mire mi” in bed. But the bar writing is less impressive: “Hand on waist will make you obey me,” and the Londoner stabbing imagery in the last line of the final verse aren’t exactly standouts. He’s proven elsewhere on the project that he can describe desire in a loving and detailed way.
What ushers listeners through the forgettable moments of the album is that Chris doesn’t try to resolve the discrepancies. He can follow up “I’d be a liar if I said I ain’t spend the last two weeks on a résumé” with a line like, “I’m the type to pick sides then to air out who bother me,” and not attempt to over-explain the relationship between the one begging for a job on Indeed and the one murdering you on a beat. The album doesn’t try to make a case for these being two different people, or that the closed-fisted one is a fantasy and the open-hearted one is real.
“My grandma used to say that she can’t wait to see me shine.”
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Patience,” “Screaming at the Sky,” “Huncho’s Prayer”