Open Mike Eagle makes himself a mixtape
Open Mike Eagle has always been attuned to underground hip-hop's bigger picture, in ways that show how often he's had to keep on his toes. It's not just borne out in his off-the-cuff facility with language, though his sharp-thinking, moving-target adaptability means he's every bit as perceptive a dot-connector in his side gigs as a podcast host and interviewer — check for the hip-hop history Q&A sessions on What Had Happened Was and his artist-conversation series Secret Skin — as he is drawing off impulse-driven battle-rap improvisation. His creative spark, largely inspired by the lyrically minded, community-building approach of Los Angeles collective Project Blowed, shone so bright he even found himself part of a scientific study to attempt to find out just how the brain actually works during freestyle rap sessions. And even if calling his 2010 breakthrough album Unapologetic Art Rap left him open to outside confusion about what that genre signifier actually meant, it also made that descriptor feel open-ended, accommodating Eagle's boundless perspective — which, while heavy on a referential depth that would rival the '90s Simpsons writers room, also snuck through more than a trace of confessional directness. For much of his 2010s output, he'd get personal in a way that didn't overshare, but still felt pulled from a place where this is me, and "me" is complicated was a good way to establish a horizon-scanning point of view.
So when he released his 2020 album , the L.A.-via-Chicago rapper's more direct turn towards frank and upfront discussions of his own personal struggles and stresses felt like a cathartic culmination. Eagle is always working out the internal contradictions and external impositions that come with being an independent hip-hop artist, benefiting from a perceptively sardonic touch that canand the project-housing community hauntology of 2017's Robert Taylor Homes-raised . Both displayed Eagle's finely attuned sense of how he saw himself, the community that raised him and the creative fields he became a part of — and, more often than not, attempted to confront the flaws and struggles in those experiences with the clarity of someone who needs to feel less alone in having them.
