Emmanuel (studio album) by Ameer Vann

From ForegroundNoise 09/28/2019 13:37

Perhaps redemption for Ameer Vann was not too much to hope for. Sure, his violent and occasionally sadistic lyrics had always sat him a little at odds with the rest of Brockhampton, but maybe being forced to leave the group as a result of his behaviour might have provided him with the wake-up call he desperately needed. Maybe, after sixteen months of gathering his thoughts, of assessing the damage, Vann might have taken a step in the right direction, and put out an EP which both satisfactorily addressed the allegations raised against him, whilst also proving his artistic credibility outside of Brockhampton.

Unfortunately, Emmanuel fails to do either of these things. The first words of the opening track set the overall tone for the release: “it’s so hard to say ‘I’m sorry’”. He’s not kidding - nowhere does Vann manage to apologise to anyone, and it takes all of 24 seconds from this point before he starts to make a literal list of all the people responsible for his mistakes. The closest we get to an acknowledgement of his wrongful treatment of women follows soon after, though all the detachment of “had a girl, she was a goddess, I fucked up and had to lose her” manages to achieve is a strong sense of déjà vu given his non-committal apologies on social media.

With this half-hearted attempt at an apology out of the way, Vann now feels he has freed himself up to address far more pressing issues than several accusations of sexual misconduct. As if his refusal to properly confront the allegations didn’t already display a disappointing lack of progress, his newfound attitude towards Brockhampton is a frustrating step backward. Despite releasing a statement at the time in which Vann apologised to the band members for putting them in a “difficult situation” and not telling them about his “past experiences earlier”, on ‘Sunday Night’ we’re treated to the line: “n*ggas supposed to stick up for their family, but we see they don't”. With the gift of hindsight, Vann has now decided the situation wasn’t difficult at all. This alternate narrative comes to a head on ‘Los Angeles’ which drips with so much irony it comes up to your neck. The moment Vann lost his innocence, we’re told, is when he signed a record deal with Brockhampton since “money complicated every issue”. Apparently the lies and infidelities he admitted to in 2018 were all but forgotten in the face of such a watershed moment. Elsewhere in the track we’re told his bandmates are two-faced by abandoning him, as Vann goes back on an apology he was happy to make in the public eye; he accuses them of using his name as a “meal ticket” to sell records since Dom McLennon’s verse on new song ‘Dearly Departed’ references Vann, failing to recognise that there hasn’t been up to this point a single track where he hasn’t called attention to the split himself.

It’s clear that the jabs McLennon made have cut Vann deep. Though the frankly unconvincing “I ain’t no boy in a band, I am more than a man” is the only explicit response to McLennon’s “pass the weight off to your friends and never face the truth/because you never learned how to be a man”, there are signs littered throughout the release that it is Vann’s obsession with his own manhood which motivates him. The spartan trap beats are a far cry from the colourful production of the Saturation series, and when they’re coupled with self-serious lyrics intent on painting Vann as a po-faced hardman without ever really confronting his real demons, the songs rarely succeed in saying anything at all. One of the worst offenders is the hook to ‘Glock 19’, where Vann threatens to shoot people who “talk shit” about him, being somehow oblivious to the implications that might have given the nature of his downfall last year. Despite its tone-deaf chorus, ‘Glock 19’ still manages to be the most memorable song here since the inclusion of a haunting operatic vocal sample means that the instrumentation is allowed to breathe and momentarily escape the prevailing sense of genericism. Vann becomes so afraid that genuine expression will render him effeminate he buries himself in a production and lyrical style that is so routinely associated with hardcore hip hop that it comes off as inoffensive. Even in ‘Glock 19’, his highest point, Vann still tells us “I'ma keep runnin' from the past”. We can only hope he’s ready when it finally catches up to him.

This is a condensed version of an article I wrote for my blog. You can read the full version here: https://sidfranklyn1.wixsite.com/foregroundnoise/post/review-ameer-vann-emmanuel-ep