It embraces in-betweenness, and it’s eponymous in its name, aptly describing the condition we live in today-though that wasn’t the intention: there isn’t a single quarantine bar in the album. Limbo can be best described as Good For You and ONEPOINTFIVE’s love child. It’s not that ONEPOINTFIVE lacked introspection or joy-the project cheekily opens with a soliloquy from comedian Rickey Thompson saying “sad on your mf birthday?” which set listeners up to expect more personal reflections and musings, and less flexing new personal wealth and status-but giving into this would be inauthentic. “Money make the sun go south/ And it make my self-esteem/ But it never take my dream.” The song is about how our lives have been reduced to chasing money and how little solace there is in knowing this. “Money” is brilliant in that it’s not only a critique on consumerism, but how our desires are socialized by it. There was a short life between Good For You’s “Money”-a track musing on the perils of consumerism, surviving in a capitalist world-and ONEPOINTFIVE’s Hiccup and DapperDan-tracks that embrace excess, luxury and fame. The project was bass-heavy and braggadocious, a departure from the melodic buoyancy his fans knew him for. In 2018, he followed up Good For You with the release of ONEPOINTFIVE, a project that Pitchfork claimed, “Aminé’s feel-good music starts to lose some of the stained, lived-in quality that once made it so rich.” As Aminé cleverly, and almost mockingly, refused classification by calling the project an ep/lp/mixtape album, critics claimed that this in-between project didn’t live up to their hopes of what it could have been. I didn’t understand what people meant by it, at first I took offense to it, but I’ve moved on and I haven’t heard that term in a very long time.” I literally had 5 dollars in my Bank of America account, overdraft fees. I wasn’t even signed when that was blowing up. “When I first came out, and I saw the term ‘industry plant’, I had to ask my manager what that meant. Conspiracy theorists, self-proclaimed experts of the music industry, claimed he was an industry plant because Aminé seemed to come out of nowhere overnight. Most Black artists that are well-received by the mainstream have their authenticity questioned, and the most extreme response is to assume they’re manufactured. Virality is incalculable and difficult to replicate there are forces and algorithms at work that evade explanation. Good For You was vivacious, aerated with the imagination that youthfulness and ambition bring. Even his more autobiographical, contemplative songs, such as “Sundays” and “Turf” were earnest and compelling in their joy. Good For You dropped in the summer of 2017, a year after the success of “Caroline”, and the album was heralded as feel-good, playful and lighthearted. The precocious skits in his music videos and the inventiveness of his colorful videos, particularly stood out. It was in this aesthetic world that “Caroline,” Portland-rapper Aminé’s first breakout single, existed in and it surpassed heights that inevitably made it a cultural touchstone of that era. The memories of that time were lush with pastel backdrops it was the era of #BlackBoyJoy, flower crowns, and glitter, aesthetics that claimed to be challenging masculinity. It was the last summer before a Trump term which in turn, conjures nostalgia for a time that wasn’t exactly blissful. In hindsight, the soundtrack of the summer of 2016 embodies an innocence and naivety we can’t replace or ever recreate. It just reminds you of 2016, 2017 summer,” he says. “I feel like Good For You is very time-bound.
#Amine limbo pitchfork update
You know, like go live a life and go try it, you know, travel the world, meet new people, friends, relationships, whatever it is, come back and reflect, update my fans and whoever wants to hear.”
You know what I mean? And that's how I kind of like love to put my albums together. And then when they dropped that album, I kind of got an update on their life. “I loved like when I was a kid not knowing where Usher was in the world or where 50 Cent was in the world. Instead, Aminé is dedicated to sharing his life through his art and music. “Like I know you see me promoting ‘Riri’ but like I'm doing it because I believe in this album so much, not because I think like I want all the views, all the attention-it's just because I want like, you know, the album to do well.” He’s unmoved and uninterested in the ‘celebrity’ as a persona and the performative burden of being in the public eye. He’s in a black t-shirt, his locs are tied up, and he speaks with piercing earnestness about promoting his sophomore album, Limbo. “I hate self-promotion so much,” he tells me over Facetime.
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