Stop Being Sober

Paul Thompson reviews Isaiah Rashad's 'IT'S BEEN AWFUL,' the Chattanooga rapper's extraordinary new album.

Art by DJ Short

Fifteen years ago this spring, I was in a small ad-hoc gallery in Montréal staring at a looping video. It was about 20 seconds long, and for that 20 seconds, the camera pulls steadily back. Initially, there is just a silver shimmer; as we zoom out, we see a grid of discrete silver figures, once square but now contorted, presumably around whatever, or whomever, is underneath. At first it recalls marathoners wrapped in the emergency blankets volunteers hand out at finish lines. But as the the sheer quantity of blotches multiples—and as the movement under them registers less and less—it suggests, instead, victims of some sort of mass casualty event. Finally, there’s a reference point for scale: a standard Bic lighter. These are pieces of aluminum foil. The title of the video, written in marker on a sheet of paper tacked to the wall, was “SUPERMAN.”

Ten years after I saw that video, I reviewed The House Is Burning, Isaiah Rashad’s sly and smart third record, for Pitchfork. That review begins: “It seems as if Isaiah Rashad only makes comeback albums.” Now, another half-decade on, Rashad has returned with IT’S BEEN AWFUL, his most ambitious, accomplished, and idiosyncratic music to date. Again, the subtext is a long absence and personal gauntlet endured to get here. But AWFUL is not a reprise of Burning’s rehab arc—it scrambles tidy recovery narratives, for Rashad and writ large. Over beats that are mostly midtempo but shot through with a sense of urgent, perpetual motion, he offers a self-portrait in asides. The challenge of confronting life on its own terms is rendered as a puzzle that keeps morphing just as you think you’ve locked some pieces into place. Though dotted with songs that could stand alone as radio hits, IT’S BEEN AWFUL is more accurately understood as a collage of counterarguments to conventional thinking about sobriety and personal growth.

This is true in part because AWFUL is not about sobriety per se. Substance abuse is presented as both horribly destructive and a necessary escape—not one after the other, but with each reading bursting through at inconvenient moments. Wedding rings and debit cards are given the same semiotic weight; on “M.O.M.,” even the act of pouring out confessions on record is presented as a vice, which of course it can be. Things feel good and then they corrode your brain, stomach, soul—and it all happens at once.

From the time he released Cilvia Demo in 2014, Rashad has been a phenomenally accomplished rapper, able to channel the bend and syncopation of his largely Southern influences, and to map those qualities onto the more staccato cadences that are in vogue today. On AWFUL, his voice is almost always tweaked just a few degrees in one direction or another: sometimes doubled, at others isolated, occasionally with a little distortion kicked like sand across its surface. What results are rewardingly varied textural shifts in a record that has a uniform rhythmic pulse. Rashad has also honed an instinct for delivering personal revelations in unlikely vehicles.

On “ACT NORMAL,” a brief family history of sex addiction comes in a pleasant, bouncing flow that could be the template for any anodyne-but-professional Rap Caviar fodder. What makes this feel radically honest is that the point is not the juxtaposition of form and content—it’s that any venture can become suffused with the dread and neuroses we accumulate throughout our lives. Earlier, on “DO I LOOK HIGH?,” the sort of lightly extraterrestrial vocal manipulation that Kendrick often uses as a virtuosic flourish is used instead as a way to depersonalize the vocal and therefore invite confession, the way Future uses Autotune. Imagine stumbling across a group of adolescent aliens, crashlanded and “watching too much porn to even know what we like.” “Superpowers,” he raps, “don’t overuse ‘em all.”

Over the past decade and a half, much has been made of rappers breaking the genre’s long-held taboo of never copping to addiction. Until the 2010s, mainstream rap had seen infrequent songs about alcoholism, but narcotic use on wax was relegated mostly to weed, and weed was something to brag about—quality, quantity, price in either direction. What happened next was twofold: Rap began to intermingle with EDM, and rappers started rapping unabashedly about doing molly in a way that was once relegated to the Bay Area. Elsewhere, a separate wave of MCs began to detail extreme, sometimes debilitating dependence on prescription cough syrups.

The latter is relevant to IT’S BEEN AWFUL, which is sometimes painful to listen to for the way Rashad details the toll substance use has taken on his health and his relationships. While a handful of different narcotics are alluded to, the one that hangs over the LP is meth. This is novel for rap, both because it runs counter to the image of downers as the default drugs for self-medication—rumination reads as escape from trauma in a way that ecstasy does not—and because many people with largely straight social circles don’t know people who do meth on a regular basis. In 2022, two sex tapes of Rashad with other men were leaked; on AWFUL, he raps tenderly about both men and women, but the pronouns of his love interests are likely less foreign to straight listeners than this particular substance. The truly masterful thing Rashad does with meth on these records is to communicate, without ever explicating the point, how a desire to feel more than human is in fact the thing that can destroy you.

Rashad offers a dizzying number of melodic ideas; little tangents within verses could be load-bearing choruses on other commercial albums. The most confounding—and most fun—aspect of the record is that rather than seeming polished, this array of hooks disorients the listener. At its core, IT’S BEEN AWFUL is a fugue: of love, of self-destruction, of regeneration. It’s an argument against absolutes, a celebration of the grey.