On how Wale and DC got on, then got great.
Both Wale and Washington, DC have discovered mainstream acceptance.
Wale’s just-released album SHINE is fantastic, mainly because it’s best if it’s judged as how a man and a city evolved from hustling and grinding through the independent underground to brilliantly shining in the mainstream pop spotlight. Just like Washington, DC’s oftentimes fractious relationship with it’s “Chocolate City” heritage in the past decade, for ten years Wale Folarin as a rapper (and specifically a rapper claiming Washington, DC as home) has been as terrible, no good, and very bad as the city’s hip-hop ambassador as a kid named Alexander written about by author Judith Viorst in 1972. However, just as the Nation’s Capital has, though scathed, emerged evolved as a 21st century epicenter of American pop culture, so has Wale now finally arrived as the DC repping rap superstar he was likely always supposed to be.
There’s two closed buildings of what are now many closed establishments on the legendary one-time “Black Broadway” that is U Street, NW that make sense on numerous levels as a terrific place to start this story.
State of the Union and Bohemian Caverns.
In the 1990s, it was at venues like State of the Union, a nightclub with a vaunted open mic night, that the one-time history of the Nation’s Capital as a vibrant city with a thriving backpacker and independent legacy was crafted and curated. In the 2000s, it was at the Liv Nightclub, a sparsely decorated “nightclub” above the vaunted subterranean jazz haunt Bohemian Caverns, where the vibrant, thriving and independent legacy of DC rap continued.
Regarding those nights in the 90s and 2000s, a 2009 article in the Georgetown Voice noted, “‘D.C.’s population isn’t big enough to support a diverse subculture, meaning artists of vastly different styles were crammed into the same clubs and venues. “You’ll get the thugs at the underground show and the backpack rappers at the thug show because they’re all waiting to get on the same open mic, where in other cities they’d be separate,” producer/rapper Oddisee, founder of the Diamond District group, said.’”
It’s 2017, and intriguingly, none of those notions mentioned in the article quoted or history recapped above, exist on a sustainable level anymore in Washington, DC. Gentrification and massive economic shifts have replaced all of that. The buildings, the thuggery, the rugged independence, the hustle of it all are largely gone. What exists in its place is a general leveling up of the city to a sense of mainstream glitz, glamour, and finesse that the city in full and at-large has never been socio-culturally acquainted. Thus, in DC’s present being so dissimilar to the city’s well-established past, a situation exists where DC’s relationship to it’s brand new “mainstreaming” and hip-hop’s pop culture dominance is fascinating.
Nearly a decade ago, Wale released Attention: Deficit, which was an album creatively and artistically placed in and inspired by the Nation’s Capital. Of course, in 2009, DC was at the start of the wave that has now overtaken the city, and as Oddisee noted above, there were backpackers and thug rappers galore actively attempting to thrive in the city. Thus, Wale’s decidedly VERY pop, and Lady Gaga-featuring lead single “Chillin’” really missed the mark.
Attention Deficit’s underwhelming performance begat a mixed bag of near-super smashes from the rapper that in many ways mirrored a city on the cusp of something more undergoing significant and wildly unexpected urban renewal. For every go-go laced groove like “Pretty Girls,” “Bait,” or “Clappers,” there were quasi R & B rap singles like Miguel feature “Lotus Flower Bomb,” Rick Ross-aided “Diced Pineapples,” Tiara Thomas/Rihanna duet “Bad,” or SZA duet “The Need To Know,” strip club anthem like “No Hands,” radio aimed non-released singles like “Sweatin Out Weaves,” “Barry Sanders,” and “Georgetown Press,” or yes, even rapping over the theme songs of WWE superstars like Razor Ramon and Sasha Banks.
SHINE sounds like nothing Wale’s ever done before. On one level this progression occurs because he’s stronger as an artistic creative and rapper. Songs like G-Eazy collaboration “Fashion Week,” J Balvin collaboration “Colombia Heights (Te Llamo),” Major Lazer-produced and WizKid featuring “My Love,” and feel like the end game of wading through five albums and ten mixtapes of material-as-learning process along the road of becoming truly great.
On another level, this album is great because the evolution of the artist’s humanity as evidenced in how refreshingly good the material sounds is easily comparable to the Nation’s Capital’s development into something that is wholly different than it once was.
In 2008, Washington, DC “got on” as a city in many ways due to the election of Barack Obama dovetailing with the demise and displacement of the city’s older and lower-income communities respectively allowing for cultural conditions to exist where radical socioeconomic renewal was possible. DC “got great” as the logical end of said demise, displacement and renewal, as the birth and entrenchment of #newDC reached its finish line.
Seven years ago, Wale “got on” by standing alone as a fresh-faced indie pop rapper emergent in the midst of the end of the era of dominance of backpack and thug rap in the Nation’s Capital. Seven years later, Wale “got great” as a grown ass man and pop industry veteran who now stands — alongside artists like GoldLink, Kingpen Slim, and what is likely to be numerous others — as the mainstream pop musical face of the sound and style of a city that will likely never again be what it was, and wholly arriving now as something that very few (maybe save Wale) ever expected it to be.
