With the controversial rapper's first new material since his forced departure from Brockhampton, it's unclear if any lessons have been learnt...
Sure, fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong, but what if it was a little less? Say fifty thousand, or five thousand? Try 606, the number of disgruntled Brockhampton fans who have signed this online petition to reinstate Ameer Vann as a member of the best boy band since One Direction. Spurred on by the advent of the #MeToo movement, his forced exit in May of last year followed mounting allegations from former partners of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. 606 might at first seem a drop in the ocean; we are talking about a group whose album last year sold over a hundred thousand copies in its first week after all. Yet the millions of streams Emmanuel already boasts on Spotify point toward a contingent willing to look past last year’s accusations far greater than 606. The number we could chalk down to mere curiosity has long since been passed.
When we place Vann in the context of an artist like Chris Brown, this number should come as little surprise to us. If Brown’s meteoric return to commercial success shows that there does exist a place in the mainstream for artists who can shrug off a domestic assault conviction with a few self-contradictory apologies, it seems unlikely that even the multiple accusations levelled at Vann were ever going to prove career-ending. Delivered in a slew of now-deleted tweets, Vann’s own response to the controversy was similarly muted, seemingly admitting wrongdoing whilst at the same time denying the validity of any of the accusations whenever they crossed legal lines. The most confusing moment of this semantic balancing act came with an admission that while he did disrespect his partners, he did not disrespect their boundaries. The details of what Vann meant by ‘disrespect’ were for the most part left unspecified.
Their concessive tone might have presented the veneer of an apology, but in truth the statements themselves gave nothing new away. If Vann’s admission of being “selfish, childish, and unkind” in his relationships rang some bells for you in May 2018, it was probably because you’d listened to some of his music: on Brockhampton’s ‘BLEACH’, Vann asks God to look away from a string of self-destructive sexual encounters; on ‘MILK’ we’re told that “a couple women […] know some things/about lies that I done told and shit that I done said”; the entire basis of his 2016 solo track ‘I’m Sorry’ is an address to a mistreated former lover. It goes without saying that to take every word in hip hop as gospel has disturbing implications given the number of rappers whose lyrics have been provided in court as evidence of criminal activity. However, when it’s no secret that Vann’s lyrical persona largely consists of having skeletons in the closet, non-specific confessions such as “I’ve fucked up” or “I’ve [...] been dismissive to my exes” feel non-committal when these are the same sentiments that appear throughout his discography.
Nevertheless, in discussions concerning Brockhampton, the normal rules of political engagement do not apply. With the exception of Vann’s own presentation, the appeal for many fans is that they are startlingly progressive in their politics. Take Saturation II cut ‘JUNKY’ for example: Matt Champion’s closing verse bemoans the hypocrisy of rape culture, whilst all in just the first minute Kevin Abstract details his mother’s refusal to accept his homosexuality until he signed a record deal, his anxieties that he might be unconsciously contributing to homophobic culture by sleeping with closeted men, and the importance of being open about his sexuality given the lack of representation of out male rappers in the mainstream, almost two years before the most successful single in American music history became authored by a queer black hip hop artist. If anyone were to doubt the severity with which Brockhampton felt about these issues, one need only look to their decision to kick out Vann, who had not only been one of the groups most prominent members (his face is plastered over the front of all three of the Saturation album covers) but had also co-founded the project with Abstract when they were in their teens.
Perhaps then, redemption for Ameer Vann on Emmanuel was not too much to hope for. Sure, his violent and occasionally sadistic lyrics had always sat him a little at odds with the rest of his bandmates, but maybe being forced to leave the group as a result of his behaviour might have provided him with the wake-up call he desperately needed. Maybe, after sixteen months of gathering his thoughts, of assessing the damage, Vann might have taken a step in the right direction, and put out an EP which both satisfactorily addressed the allegations raised against him, whilst also proving his artistic credibility outside of Brockhampton.
"This alternate narrative drips with so much irony it comes up to your neck."
Unfortunately, Emmanuel fails to do either of these things. The first words of the opening track set the overall tone for the release: “it’s so hard to say ‘I’m sorry’”. He’s not kidding - nowhere does Vann manage to apologise to anyone, and it takes all of 24 seconds from this point before he starts to make a literal list of all the people responsible for his mistakes. The closest we get to an acknowledgement of his wrongful treatment of women follows soon after, though all the detachment of “had a girl, she was a goddess, I fucked up and had to lose her” manages to achieve is a strong sense of déjà vu.
With this half-hearted attempt at an apology out of the way, Vann now feels he has freed himself up to address far more pressing issues than several accusations of sexual misconduct. As if his refusal to properly confront the allegations didn’t already display a disappointing lack of progress, his newfound attitude towards Brockhampton is a frustrating step backward. Despite releasing a statement at the time in which Vann apologised to the band members for putting them in a “difficult situation” and not telling them about his “past experiences earlier”, on ‘Sunday Night’ we’re treated to the line: “n*ggas supposed to stick up for their family, but we see they don't”. With the gift of hindsight, Vann has now decided the situation wasn’t difficult at all. This alternate narrative comes to a head on ‘Los Angeles’ which drips with so much irony it comes up to your neck. The moment Vann lost his innocence, we’re told, is when he signed a record deal with Brockhampton since “money complicated every issue”. Apparently the lies and infidelities he admitted to in 2018 were all but forgotten in the face of such a watershed moment. Elsewhere in the track we’re told his bandmates are two-faced by abandoning him, as Vann goes back on an apology he was happy to make in the public eye; he accuses them of using his name as a “meal ticket” to sell records since Dom McLennon’s verse on new song ‘Dearly Departed’ references Vann, failing to recognise that there hasn’t been up to this point a single track where he hasn’t called attention to the split himself.
"It is Vann’s obsession with his own manhood which motivates him."
It’s clear that the jabs McLennon made have cut Vann deep. Though the frankly unconvincing “I ain’t no boy in a band, I am more than a man” is the only explicit response to McLennon’s “pass the weight off to your friends and never face the truth/because you never learned how to be a man”, there are signs littered throughout the release that it is Vann’s obsession with his own manhood which motivates him. The spartan trap beats are a far cry from the colourful production of the Saturation series, and when they’re coupled with self-serious lyrics intent on painting Vann as a po-faced hardman without ever really confronting his real demons, the songs rarely succeed in saying anything at all. One of the worst offenders is the hook to ‘Glock 19’, where Vann threatens to shoot people who “talk shit” about him, being somehow oblivious to the implications that might have given the nature of his downfall last year. Despite its tone-deaf chorus, ‘Glock 19’ still manages to be the most memorable song here since the inclusion of a haunting operatic vocal sample means that the instrumentation is allowed to breathe and momentarily escape the prevailing sense of genericism. Vann becomes so afraid that genuine expression will render him effeminate he buries himself in a production and lyrical style that is so routinely associated with hardcore hip hop that it comes off as inoffensive. Even in ‘Glock 19’, his highest point, Vann still tells us “I'ma keep runnin' from the past”. We can only hope he’s ready when it finally catches up to him.
