Pink Siifu has GOT FOOD AT THE CRIB again, and again has a timeless yet inventive mixtape to burn
Evan Dale // July 25, 2024
Ever the prolific force of unexpected hip-hop alchemy, Pink Siifu – Cincinnati by way Birmingham or the other way around – taking a modernist melding of stylistic queues while imbibing an unyielding mosaic of antique rap nuance – has Got Food at the Crib, again. Better yet, he’s GOT FOOD AT THE CRIB’!! VOL. 2. The first cut of the mixtape series came out last year, packing his work into a familiar run-on sentence structure where a track list is set aside in favor of one long play. There are tracks, surely, and they must have names, but that’s not what’s important. Instead, song breaks flow into one another like a live set. Fluidity reigns, and track list anonymity breathes a refreshing bit of timelessness into the listening experience.
As he’s done with projects in the past, like 2018’s ensley, GOT FOOD AT THE CRIB – in both its volumes – invokes the timeless definition of the mixtape arrangement, transporting a listener into a listening session and bypassing the ability to shuffle or skip that which shouldn’t be either shuffled or skipped to begin with. Purely listening, sans the intrinsic need to cave into our modern lack of attention span, takes priority. All of us are thrust into the entirety of the composition, as it was meant to be heard. For that, and for all the transformative, trailblazing art the rapper has granted us for years and continues to build on and widen here, we owe Pink Siifu our time.
A 25-minute mixtape, GOT FOOD AT THE CRIB’!! VOL. 2 is a stylistically expansive expression of Pink Siifu’s range. He’s always further developing his sound, alongside that of hip-hop at large. But at its core, Pink Siifu’s auditory aesthetic is defined by an understated, melodically engaged delivery flowing in and out of sample-heavy beats that tend to be underlined by dreamy, floating keystrokes and synth chords that feel taken straight from a water level at some early 90’s video game. With the foundation laid, a listener puts the project on and it subconsciously soundtracks whatever it is they’re doing with their headphones in or their speakers on. But at the same time, Pink Siifu, though with one of the more creatively liquid flows across the modern rapscape, is also a profound lyricist. When a listener takes the time to listen to what he’s saying, it's obvious that his poeticism is sculpted with intent.
For every track where his voice is used as a vector for the words to paint vivid landscapes, there’s another where it’s predominantly instrumental. In that seamless transition between his rapped aesthetic and his sung one, exists Pink Siifu’s tour de pathfinding force. He can do it all, and yet he’s not approaching any angle of musicality like anyone else. The result is likewise an ultimately independent approach to hip-hop and soul, with roots in the South and the Midwest, that bridges so many sonic spaces without ever caving to one in particular. As it ends, GOT FOOD AT THE CRIB’!! VOL. 2 begins in the balanced grey area of Pink Siifu’s signature sound. His flow is mellow yet meaningful, moving but not too quickly. His energy and the beats in tow match that intrinsic middle-groundedness. But as the project moves forward and the pendulum starts to swing, and as a slurry of anonymous features are folded into frame, GOT FOOD AT THE CRIB’!! VOL. 2 picks up steam and rolls forward with some menacingly high energy. But just as quickly as that crescendo comes to pass, so too does the ensuing melodic bit of slow-burning soul, before dissolving again into the space of balance, where Pink Siifu ultimately finds himself most often.
GOT FOOD AT THE CRIB’!! VOL. 2 is the perfect long-play mixtape to transcend its listener forward and back in time simultaneously. And Pink Siifu just might be the most understatedly influential artist of our moment of indefinability and post-genre art.