Open Mike Eagle spent the 2010s finding comedy in rap music and American nightmares. On albums like Brick Body Kids Still Daydream and Dark Comedy, he delivered hilarious socio-political insights via half-sung verses laid atop progressive production. Acclaim from publications like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and NPR coincided with headlining solo tours and top-billing at events like Adult Swim Festival. Between studio sessions, Eagle co-founded The New Negroes, a standup meets-music variety show that explores perceptions of Blackness. He and co-founder Baron Vaughn brought the show to Upright Citizens Brigade, Comedy Central, and venues around the U.S.
With over a dozen solo and collaborative projects to his name, Eagle has spent his career redefining and expanding the parameters of “art rap,” the term he coined as a shorthand for leftfield and avant-garde rap music. On Dark Comedy, he chronicled everything from smartphone addiction to the realities of being an indie artist in the streaming era with self-deprecation and side-splitting absurdity. 2017’s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream marked Eagle’s shift toward examining trauma, wading through the rubble of Chicago’s demolished Robert Taylor Homes, where several family members once lived. Anime, Trauma, and Divorce, his first full-length album on Auto Reverse Records, was among the most personal projects of his career. Neighborhood Gods Unlimited expanded that autobiographical and surrealist language further, turning an unrealized television concept into an album with an opening theme, flashbacks, a climax, and commercials.
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Under the name Me:You, Mourning [A] BLKstar co-founders LaToya Kent and RA Washington diverged from their Cleveland-based collective in 2023 with the alternately seductive and confrontational album Field Tapes in der Trash. Melding soul, jazz, blues, tunk, rock, and dub with an avant-garde post-punk aesthetic, the set pared down BLKstar's ensemble-style workings to Kent's direct poeticism and Washington's intensely rhythmic productions combining samples, loops, and programming with live instrumentation. Field Tapes in der Trash, featuring only Jah Nada and Laura B. as additional players, was issued by the American Dreams label in April 2023, a couple months after Algiers released their Kent-assisted album Shook.
