One of hip-hop’s brightest young minds finds himself in a state of deep reflection, maturing into adulthood in real time on his latest EP.
Mavi is an artist who speaks and raps with a wisdom well beyond his years. To listen to a record of his is to witness a scholar on a journey of discovery of both himself and the world around him. He’s a neuroscience student who makes soul music with personal statements that emerge as expressions of a rapidly forming ideology and whose sense of self is connected to communities—the physical communities where he lives and learns, but also the intellectual and artistic ones he’s joined with through his music and studies. These are the raps of a philosopher. And on his latest EP End of the Earth, Mavi finds himself standing on the precipice, turning around to gaze upon the path that led him here.
After the critical success of his full-length debut Let the Sun Talk, Mavi spent the subsequent months balancing the bars and the books, struggling to adjust to his new life as an artist at the vanguard of an underground rap scene alongside cerebral and soulful MCs like MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, and Pink Siifu. For all its prescience, his debut was still the work of an awkward teen transitioning into adulthood, learning how to sustain himself in spite of his earthly desires. The EP reflects that maturation, exuding confidence without devolving into braggadocio. There’s a humility to his perspective, an acknowledgment that he carries a burden passed on to him from the scholars who preceded him. He borrows a famous Nas bar to open “Town Crier,” (“No idea is original, there’s nothing new under the sun,” he raps) then immediately acknowledges it, as if to prove the point. He sees through corporate brands looking to associate with him to “seem a little woke” (“Life We Live”) and questions even his own motives: “What are we supposed to do?/All my idols dead or they took the devil fully in they idle hands/And I am like the man/Imperfect and even selfish when they lie in prayer/I am not on brand.”
This wizened perspective is reflected in the production, draped in swirling soul samples and gentle piano, twinkling tones contrasting with sad strings. The vocal mix sounds cleaner and more balanced than it’s ever been, with Mavi’s baritone at the forefront, occasionally even keeping time in place of a rhythm section. While his vocals are clearer, his thoughts are often purposefully obfuscated, encrypted in a code not necessarily meant to be deciphered by everyone. A student of phenomenology—the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view—he writes verses that are carefully constructed ruminations on his own perspective and its connection to the world at large, beaming messages into the ether for like-minded souls. The specter of Black trauma haunts the record without being its focal point: “This shit in me, not on me,” he told Pitchfork in 2020.
It would be easy to view End of the Earth through a fatalist lens, the result of a journey that ventures far from home only to find the same suffering. “I could walk to the end of Earth/I get there, still hear the screams,” he raps on “Thousand Miles,” the lament of a wanderer carrying his pain wherever he roams. But rather than weigh him down, his accumulated knowledge seems to motivate him, and he balances the power it imbues him with the responsibility that comes with it.
If his tweets are to be believed, End of the Earth is a mere sample of what’s to follow on his forthcoming full-length Shango. On its own, the EP is a captivating snapshot of one of hip-hop’s brightest young minds in a state of deep reflection, maturing into adulthood in real time.
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