Mick Jenkins, Village Underground, London, review: Jenkins is a masterful performer

Newcomer Mick Jenkins, a rapper from Chicago, is making waves in the world of hip hop with his poetic ability and clever wordplay

Clever wordplay: Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins

Mick Jenkins only released his first full-length album, The Healing Component, last month. Though he’d released several mixtapes before, he didn’t enjoy anything that could be described as mainstream success until he dropped The Water[s] in 2014. The mixtape received several positive reviews and was followed by Wave[s] the year after, which also won a healthy amount of praise from critics and listeners.

Jenkins’s music is rightly lauded for its lyricism – namely for its poetic quality and clever wordplay, something that still characterises his work in The Healing Component – as well as his keen political consciousness, with songs like Drowning and Martyrs praised for the perceptive, sometimes shocking remarks on issues like racial violence (the cover for the single, Martyrs, shows a sickening photo from the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington). His music embraces many styles, and when he dropped the video for his song P’s & Q’s last year, a number of commenters expressed disappointment that he hadn’t sampled the beat of Kano’s tune of the same name. In an interview a few weeks later, Jenkins admitted that he’d been unfamiliar with Kano, and grime in general, while making the song, and that he was trying to get into grime but was finding it difficult to ‘get past the accent’.

It seems that Jenkins has got past the accent, however, and has even been doing a bit of homework, and he showed it by kicking off his gig at Village Underground chanting the chorus to Skepta’s 'It Ain’t Safe' (presumably an entrance reserved for British audiences). Jenkins has dubbed his tour the ‘Quest for Love’, but energy is what really characterised his performance. Thanks to the help of his live drummer, he was capable of injecting energy into almost every song, even the mellower songs. He even managed to make his opening song Jazz – a calm song from The Water[s], seemingly unsuited to restless crowds – buzz with energy, and this continued throughout the night.

The show also benefitted from surprises, such as the appearance of New York rapper Kirk Knight, on whose album Late Knight Special Jenkins featured last year. The pair performed their song I Know before Knight headed off and Jenkins resumed the gig, later performing a few bars from NWA’s Fuck tha Police (an uncomplimentary reference to the police being obligatory at a hip hop gig) as well as a brief homage to fellow Chicago rapper Chance.

Perhaps the gig’s only disappointment was the absence of songs like Vibe, a slower song with striking lyricism from The Water[s], and 'Drowning', an incongruously upbeat song about, among other things, police brutality, featuring BADBADNOTGOOD. To be fair to Jenkins, though, it is difficult to imagine how these songs would have fitted into a gig with such a priority on liveliness.

Jenkins is a masterful performer, able to guide a crowd in different directions quite seamlessly, rousing and calming however he pleases – and this is what made the gig the great show that it was.