IDK’s Fourth Studio Album, ‘F65’ - a Living Art Diary of his Life in the Fast Lane- is Even More Eclectic than its Musical Expanse
Evan Dale // May 9, 2023
Eclectic has always fallen short as an adjective when describing the vast sonic breadth - and even wider artistic reach - of PG County, Maryland’s IDK. Ignorantly Delivering Knowledge, the 30-year-old rapper, vocalist, designer, collaborator, and more than anything, alchemist, is well-aware that what he’s delivering most is boundless stylistic experimentation. Timelessly raw, pleasantly unpolished, and indescribably nuanced, his fourth studio album, F65, spans 22 tracks, at least as many musical motifs, folds in a swatch of creations in the physical world ranging in collaborations from Nike to Mercedes-Benz - and is loosely - and of necessity - tethered by a racing theme that itself is also stretched to its limits.
It’s the indefinability, unpredictability, and unapologetic reach of his endeavors that have always made IDK such a breath of fresh air for a hip-hop scene in constant search of self-reinvention, and risks successfully taken, rather than trends unnecessarily trampled to death by the over-saturation of SoundCloud, and the short memories of its listenership, ravaged by instant-gratification and refusal to invest in their own taste. IDK’s music is a mosaic of mismatched tiles that come together to tell the kind of larger, albeit still hard-to-grasp-in-one-sitting kind of story, that requires focus and dedicated immersion of its audience. There are broadcasting samples taken of Louis Hamilton overcoming the odds and overcoming the leaderboard in the final lap. There are snippets of F-1 cars roaring, their tires screeching around city streets. There’s a ‘Free Coast’ line of Air Maxes popping with an array of colors from the flags of Ghana and Sierra Leone. A stage collaboration with racing attire brand, LANVIN for his Coachella performance and beyond adds some on-the-nose punch yet still bleeds with avant-garde gravitas. There are delicate jazz ensembles, soulful breakdowns, and bitey trap basslines interwoven into IDK’s spoonfed raps for nearly an hour. It’s within the framework of F65 - in the needling of its F-1 thematic throughlines, its harmonious tangents to luxury brands, lifestyles, and streetwear, and the unpredictability of what musical influences its protagonist will attack next - that IDK has reached further with his music, art, and overarching persona than ever before.
Contrary to what the jarring nature of the album in particular may call to mind in the opinions and sensitivities of those listening who are more aligned with the one-lane, slow-lane kind of driving, it’s exactly what modern music needs. Asking listeners to buckle in while F65 whips sharply around blind corners in the search for something new is exactly what crowns IDK as an experimental prince willing and able to navigate well beyond the expectations of a rapper in order to subject those along for the ride to something that at times feels uncomfortable, but never falls short of being anything but bold and unique. It defies the algorithm and the AI in favor of a more honest glimpse of an artist - and a human - who has never settled into one specific space.
And for IDK, who put together his short, electronically-nuanced, jarringly maneuvering EP, SIMPLE, last Summer, it’s a clear and continued pace of his evolution. In that way, it draws a lot of reminiscence towards Kendrick’s most experimental phase, orbiting To Pimp A Butterfly. Not a view of hip-hop through a Neo-Soul and smoky jazz club kaleidoscope, but instead a vocally and oft-electronically entrenched rapper projecting his already one-of-a-kind sound through the choppy waters of everything from unencumbered, mellow Soul (Cape Coast) to Atlanta Trap beats (Pit Stop and Thug Tear) and layers of self-aware Spoken Word over a saxophone (Champs-Élysées). And that’s just taking into account F65’s first four songs.
On the particularly hyphy end of IDK’s spectrum, there’s also the bass-thumping ignorance of Salty with fellow enigmatic, hype lord NLE Choppa. And there’s the anthemic top-chopper, We On Top with Rich The Kid which - fit with a Benz-laden music video - feels like it could have come from any album by way of early 2010’s Ye or Rocky.
In a more soulfully-entrenched middle ground, IDK and Benny the Butcher deliver Up The Score over a wavy string composition. With Tay Iwar’s Altè influence, IDK pursues Elmina with an homage towards the sounds of the West African Renaissance. And pulling the incomparable aesthetics of Memphis rapper Jucee Froot and Florida’s Saucy Santana, Pinot Noir emerges as an stylistically transcendent hit, progressive and necessary for an ever experimental IDK leading and ever evolving hip-hop scene somewhere it’s never been before.
The album, its tangental creative pursuits, and IDK himself have never moved faster, pulling hip-hop and its fans along with them through the unapologetically artistic, ever-meandering F65 - an exhibition of a post-genre, medium-transcendent world.
