Is He Real?

IDK's "Is He Real" album was a great project. From the album cover he gives off a very Andre 3000 archetype vibe. This being my first introduction to IDK, I was thoroughly impressed.

First and foremost he is a talented rapper. Judging based solely on the bias of his name, I expected to hear another emo trap rapper, but instead I got a vintage Neo-soul influence conscious back pack rapper with today's modern twists on rap cadence, style and production. It was great to hear all the elements of hip hop in this project. It was informative, mixed with human elements of fun, ignorance, love of sex, will, perseverance, struggle, and pain but no expression was given without reasoning for the behavior being talked about or glorified.

The album's intro Cloud Blu set up the entire point of the album which was to challenge the notion and thinking of the modern day bible, and judging from the references of God coming down as a bird in the song European Skies, one can calculate that the God of questioning is that of the Christian God, Jesus Christ.

Throughout the album, IDK is telling you of his experiences in life as it pertains to battling with the word of God from the Bible with his thoughts on there being a heaven. Questioning the validity of all sins being equal when one can be a murderer and the other as he was self-proclaiming, can just be a masturbator, but both individuals would be sinning the same.

Also challenging, where is this loving God who cares so much about order, as he went into rhyming about how we can fight over the language and rules of the Bible in politics, schools, and engage in hate speech, crime and wars while this merciful God lets that continue but the homeless still remains homeless. IDK questions where is the God in that. Ultimately he brings you in even more where he gets personal about his life in poverty and losing his mother to AIDS, questioning how would God let that happen, or why God didn't fix things for the better in regards to his mother.

Leaving you with the ending part of the outro track Julia where IDK goes into a monologue about how we cannot describe the color red without just opposing it to another color. Expressing that if one was not told to describe "red" as red, how would one be able to tell another person that something is red if they believe it to be blue. Surprisingly, with the tone of this album starting with an intro that ends with saying God isn't real, to end with an off-putting deduction that God is real simply because you can't prove otherwise felt very lackluster which turnt what could have been an amazing album to just a good to great one.

There was so much effort in creating reasoning, and explaining multiple ways how the Bible can come off archaic and that God isn't real, I wish IDK would have been able to expound more on how he felt God is real. Although he gave his feelings that God is love and that God is in everyone, I would have loved if he delve into that part of his beliefs as much as he created a project about his disconnect with believing in a God. I feel like I left this album feeling that I had more emotional reasons to believe God isn't real, than trying to accept the vague reasoning for God being real, which left me feeling like the project just cut off and didn't really finish. Or maybe that was what IDK was going for, to end off with an outro built for a forum topic.

Either way, it was still a good project and he answered his own question..... maybe.

Click the picture, stream the album

Click the picture to stream the album

Tribe Rating:

8/10