Music
Review: Open Mike Eagle Offers Impressionistic History Lesson
Our take on 'Brick Body Kids Still Daydream,' the latest from the Chicago-born rapper
Motormouthed rapper Open Mike Eagle has gotten raves
for albums that explore the comedy of neurosis. His new one, easily his
headiest, is a concept LP built around Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, a famously
mismanaged housing project destroyed 10 years ago. Eagle impressionistically
inserts himself into events real and imagined. “We live in a space that
should have never existed,” he raps. The results add a historical angle to
hip-hop’s powerful mix of the personal and political.