GRANDSON - I LOVE YOU, I'M TRYING
On May 5th Canadian-American rapper Jordan Edward Benjamin, most commonly known as grandson, released his sophomore project I Love You, I’m Trying, a short 32 minute snapshot of a guy who simply wants peace. His debut album Death of an Optimist, showed a young man attempting to make sense of hand that 2020 had dealt him and as the title implies, trying his best not to let the little bit of hope and faith in the world that he has left die. Death of an Optimist voiced the dread and disillusionment many millennials like grandson felt during and before the pandemic.
With I Love You, I’m Trying, grandson lets us in on how that journey of understanding has gone in the past three years. While Death of an Optimist felt like grandson throwing in the tile, this album shows him trying to rediscover the very optimism he had lost sight of. This is evident simply from analyzing the striking differences in the album covers. In his debut, grandson is on a black and white cover, looking upward angrily with thick black x’s on both eyes, a perfect match for an album that is dark only because it was written in a very dark time. I Love You, I’m Trying shows a nearly invisible grandson standing in a sunlit forest that emanates an aura of healing and growth exemplified by the presence of nature in the cover.
grandson, like many artists, created what I like to call his “What’s next?” album. This type of album is a post-pandemic followup that paints a portrait of how much has changed in an artist’s life due to the pandemic, and now that it is “over”, how to pick up the pieces. That’s not an easy job as grandson assures us in I Love You, I’m Trying. Introspection requires us to unpack what fulfils us and what troubles us in addition to the impact of today’s climate on our personal identities. In the album’s frontrunner ‘Eulogy’, grandson begins the song with a rant-like question and statement combo. “Do I exist if I don’t exist on the internet? / How can I relax? The end is imminent / Twelve shots fired on a man that’s innocent / Growing up ain’t like how I pictured it.” grandson expresses frustration with the constant influx of news, good or bad, that we receive from social media. He puts into rhyme and rhythm that feeling of being overstimulated by a world that is not easy to separate yourself from.
Listening to this album and his previous one, I instantly hear the twenty one pilots (whom he coincidentally is labelmates with) and Linkin Park-esque deliveries in his lyrics. He accompanies the heavy subject matter with mostly upbeat, electronic-driven instrumentals that employ industrial percussive effects and an atmosphere created mostly by the guitar chords and riffs that he chooses.
Some would say that grandson displays what teenage angst looks like when it flows into your twenties, and although it is stressed and tense most of the time, his music can’t be relegated to that pejorative. Here we have a guy facing all of the obstacles that the real world promised him not to mention the demons that always seem to lurk nearby. In songs like ‘Something to Hide’ bears his soul, giving us a quick, yet informative scope of his life as a kid and his family’s history with mental health related issues. In other tracks such as ‘Murderer’, grandson writes from the point of view of a manic entertainer with delusions of slaughtering his emo counterparts Yungblud and MGK if they don’t ask him to hop on a song. Then there are melancholic ballads like that of ‘Heather’ , a tribute to the fans who have both stayed and gone, who ultimately helped get him to this point in his career.
grandson has ushered in another generation of alternative rock mixed with rap that feels brooding and on edge. Some would say that he is an embodiment of the internet pop culture caricature of a “sad boi”, but that is not the case. These aren’t those after-hour heavy ruminations on life, failed relationships, failures and the like that culminate in practically nothing that could contribute to growth. It is obvious that he is looking inside to understand everything happening on the outside. Each of these songs serve as sonic promises to himself and the world that he will never lose himself in the midst of the noise and cacophonies that surround him.
Alana Brown-Davis
★★★★☆