Medhane - Cold Water

May 26, 2020 - TBHG

Medhane Olushola is here with his latest full-length Cold Water. It’s an album focused on virtues: “soul,” “love,” “pain;” things that find themselves summed up in faith. The album’s thrust is found early in the album on ‘No Cap,’ when he says, “my lil sister growin’ so you know who it’s for.” This is an album intended to witness and participate in uplifting. 

Drawing samples from soul and jazz, Olushola nestles into his roots which allows him to write with his greatest clarity to date. ‘Off Tha Strength’ is a rap of short lines, a terse but heartfelt intro to the album. Olushola explores the transient nature of the work a person has to do and the way progress is synonymous with change. “Feelings change/ Feelings fade/ All the same.” It’s a testament to the sturdiness required of someone—that which seems at first like a paradox but is not—to be changeable yet to know at the core that one is unchanging because one is the change: a person is a group of actions in a situation, and a situation is a set of circumstances which can be left alone or altered by actions. 

The artist has found humor in inverting the set-ups of melancholy lines. In ‘Live,’ Olushola raps, “Love my brothers but I seen ‘em change.” He pauses there for a beat in which a listener says in their heart a solemn “amen,” but the line is unfinished. After the beat, he concludes the line with, “for the better,” and the listener says in their heart a joyful “amen.”  

Olushola talks extensively with Complex about the role of the rap community in his work and in interpreting the world. The music for Olushola is a passion, but it is also a means of gathering people together, of demystifying the American idea of the monolithic black experience. By adding his story, which deals in mental illness, spiritual journeying, and the mundane of his everyday life to the chorus of black artists, Olushola both deepens and adds another fray of individualism to the narrative. In his interview, when asked about his collaborators and influencers on this album (Navy Blue, Caleb Giles, Adé Hakim, Standing on the Corner, and KeiyaA) and the parallels he sees between this community and the jazz community of the 60s and 70s, Olushola says: 

We all experience similar things in our lives and we also have our unique experiences, and the way we portray that in our art speaks to a greater truth. The black experience is not monolithic. Being a young black man in America, you’re definitely experiencing prejudice, racism, gentrification, economic disparity—but none of that makes blackness a monolith. The fact that we’re all in the same circle, but with our own viewpoints, is what makes it special. Poorboy [the 2017 collaboration between Medhane and Slauson Malone] doesn’t sound the same as May God Bless Your Hustle [by MIKE], but they’re both expressions of how we understand the world. 

Cold Water is a short but powerful album, totaling thirty-five minutes. In it, Medhane Olushola has found his clear expression of the world as he sees it, and as he’s coped with it, saying in ‘New Drip,’ “Holdin’ onto grace seen shit change/ In the traffic took some passion and I switched lanes/ Knew the way whole time, sun shine in the sky.” There is a way forward, and it is the only way. ⛰️