“The music is not the only thing you need to be good at, it’s the whole, that’s what makes an artist and artist,” Aminé – a huge film buff – tells me. “I had to literally use student loan money to pay the crew and directed myself because I knew what I wanted to accomplish, and I’m picky.” “I was broke as shit, broke as a dog man, I had no money to my name,” Aminé says of making the Caroline video. The self-directed visuals established Aminé’s happy-go-lucky, goofball charisma that pushes the Black, quirky skater culture popularised by Tyler, The Creator. Inspired by a birthday trip with 10 of his friends, the summer-toned, tennis-themed video is in a long line of distinctive videos which have boosted Aminé’s popularity and built his surreal aesthetic world.Īminé first broke through in 2016 with the high-energy and very yellow video for Caroline (now sitting on 299 million views) for which he ate bananas and did Busta Rhymes-inspired fishbowl camera close ups in the back of a car. Our chat takes place two days before the release of Limbo (which was pushed back three times, allowing Aminé to tweak it to perfection) and just after he’s dropped the video for the Young Thug collaboration Compensating. And so we have Limbo, the LA-via-Portland rapper’s second studio album, in which he grapples with the subjects of morality, systemic racism and the prospect of bringing children into a messed up world, all while still retaining that playful quirk and those moments of carefree Black boy energy which have always made him stand out. “I never came into this album like ‘Hey guys! I’m in a midlife crisis, I’m going to make a midlife crisis album’ but I just really felt lost in my decisions,” Aminé tells me with a laugh over Zoom. You’re still young enough to mess up, but old enough to know better, and life starts to feel a lot more real. Some friends are having kids, planning weddings and hoping to buy houses, while others are still getting into trouble, swiping infinitely on dating apps and clubbing until unholy hours. Limbo is a soundtrack for that mid-twenties period when your social circles are changing. Aminé is only 26-years-old, but he jokes that his new album was inspired by what feels like a “midlife crisis”.
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