Album Of The Year? A Review of JID’s The Forever Story
Cover art of The Forever Story
The Dreamville signee returns with his most consistent and polished work to date
By Noah Weinberg
On the opening track, “Raydar,” of his third studio album, The Forever Story, JID blasts through the listener’s ear with an exclamation towards his endless talents in the musical sphere. He bluntly raps, “I got the shit you can play for your mama…” before subduing himself to an almost whisper-like cadence, “I got the shit you can play for the hoes.”
As the self-proclaimed “East Atlanta Playboy,” Georgia native JID embodies the dimensionality that the southern United States is known for. He can spit with the game’s elite, frequently using clever alliteration and complex multisyllabic rhyme schemes, yet JID can also croon with RnB’s best. On his latest record, JID capitalizes on all of his raw and untapped potential to create one of the best rap albums of the year.
As a former college football player turned rapper, JID understands that you can’t succeed in any field without the proper guidance and training. In the four years since his last solo project, Dicaprio 2, the Dreamville signee stayed busy honing and perfecting his craft. Between several placements on his label’s Grammy-nominated compilation album, a slew of guest features, and an instrumental hand in the collective Spillage Village’s debut project, JID has been steadily improving his artistic repertoire. When it came time for The Forever Story though, JID knew there was still work to be done, so he hired a professional singing coach to improve his vocal cords.
Those upgraded vocal chops are displayed throughout The Forever Story, but most prominently on the album’s most jaw-dropping and impressive track, “Kody Blu 31.” More church hymn than hip-hop song, “Kody Blu 31” finds JID singing his heart out behind an uplifting choir guaranteed to elicit hair-raising goosebumps on the listener’s arm. With its dazzling percussion and delicately placed horn section, this track is stunningly mesmerizing and deceptively elegant. Dedicated to the deceased son of one of JID’s friends, “Kody Blu 31” finds JID imploring the family to maintain resilience in the face of such brutal adversity, or to simply “keep swangin on.”
While JID’s singing may be his most improved skill on The Forever Story, he’s still here to display his virtuosic talent as a rapper. It’s challenging to find a single hip-hop artist with better or more intricate flows than JID. According to the Twitter account HipHopbytheNumbers, JID switched his vocal tone once every 16.6 seconds and changed his flow up a whopping once every 13.9 seconds. These sudden musical changes make for a brisk and quickly-paced listen, even though the album is nearly an hour long. Nevertheless, JID’s intricate dedication to the craft of MCing bodes well for him, as evidenced by the legendary figures he got to appear on his album, like Lil Wayne and Yasin Bey (i.e., Mos Def).
Lyrically speaking, JID took a significant step forward from Dicaprio 2. He spent the last four years mastering the skill of simple, concise, yet incredibly focused wordplay. This improvement can be seen in simple lines where he flip-flops the first and last lines of a bar. For example, on “Raydar,” he speaks softly, like he’s rapping in all lowercase: “crackin a whip, whippin’ the crack/just like them crackers that did to the blacks.”
More than any rapper in today’s game, JID has mastered the use of homophones, that is, when two or more words have the same pronunciation but contain different meanings or spellings. The most potent example of JID’s homophone use can be found on the album’s second single, “Dance Now.” As the first verse draws to a close, JID delivers a staggering three homophones within a two-line stretch. He raps, “Lemme bare (bear) it all when I’m telling God, you know Imma rant (Morant) when I talk to Jah (Ja).” Jah is the shortened form of Yahweh, a biblical name of God, while “Imma rant” serves as a homophone for I’m Morant, a clever nod to NBA star Ja Morant. Ja Morant plays for the Memphis Grizzlies, whose logo is a bear, thus tying together these two lines in an unmistakably clever fashion.
For a rap album to be considered a true album of the year contender, there can’t just be flow switches every second or witty punchlines in every line. The music itself needs to be of a certain quality. Luckily enough, The Forever Story’s sonic landscape is equal parts breathtaking and addictive, like a glistening unicorn coated in crack cocaine. The album’s lead single, “Surround Sound,” utilizes a pitched and chopped-up vocal sample of Aretha Franklin’s “One Step Ahead” so exquisitely that you can’t help but applaud the craftsmanship of Christo, JID’s top producer. While on “Can’t Punk Me,” Grammy-winning producer Kaytranada gifts JID and Earthgang a special instrumental with a rumbling bassline and shimmering keys.
But my favorite instrumental on the album has to be “Dance Now.” Produced by 16-year-old Aviad, “Dance Now” samples the Jewish tune “Yoels Niggun” by the American-Hasidic band Zusha. What’s noteworthy to me is that Aviad and I both learned “Yoel’s Niggun” at the same place, our mutual summer camp, Camp Yavneh. Safe to say, it was a pretty crazy moment to wake up to a new JID single that samples a Jewish hymn my brother showed me at 13, only to later learn that one of the producers goes to the same camp I did. It’s one of those “it’s a small world” moments that only aids in my love for this album.
Simply put, this album makes for a fantastic listen, and there isn’t a single miss on the project. The writing is sharp and evocative, JID’s delivery is top-notch, and his production choices are some of 2022’s best. It still feels like JID is a relatively fresh face in the game (even though he’s 31!), but The Forever Story is an unequivocal mark of a true hip-hop master at the peak of his powers.