A couple of years ago, songs made by rapper Kodak Black as a young teenager began to recirculate online. The most striking was “Ambition,” a precociously skeptical and wounded song. “I’m 14 and already thinking ‘bout death,” he rapped. “Damn, I was raised by the dead end.”
For the rest of his teenage years, Kodak continued on this path, returning time and again to themes of hopeless circumstances, existential frailty, perseverance blended with nihilism. They ground all of his albums and mixtapes, right up through “Dying to Live,” his second studio album, which was released last month and debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart.
But Kodak’s success comes under a lingering cloud, one familiar to any observer of hip-hop in the past few years. The 21-year-old Florida rapper is scheduled to stand trial this spring on charges of criminal sexual conduct, stemming from a 2016 incident in South Carolina in which he is accused of sexually assaulting a young woman at a hotel following a concert. According to the Florence County Sheriff’s Office incident report, he bit the victim and told her “that he could not help himself.” She reported the attack to her school resource officer. Under terms of the consent order setting Kodak’s bond, he cannot discuss the case publicly, nor can anyone representing the defense or the prosecution, according to Beattie Ashmore, one of his lawyers.
Of the many rappers who in recent years have experienced explosive popularity while facing horrific criminal allegations, none is as contemplative or introspective an artist as Kodak Black. 6ix9ine is a taunter. XXXTentacion wrestled with pain but rarely with ethics. Neither arrived at a place in which morality was a recurrent theme of his work.
Over two major label albums and several mixtapes, Kodak has proved himself to be an acute observer of both his own internal conflicts and the external circumstances that helped set him on his path. If any artist in this situation is well-suited to directly tackle the complexities of these sorts of issues in his art — and in public life — it’s him.
But he hasn’t risen to the occasion. “Dying to Live” — Kodak’s first major musical statement since being released from jail in August for weapons and drug charges and probation violation — is a very strong album, and in places, you hear the Kodak who might have something of substance to say. On “Transgression,” he proposes a turn to penitence: “I did everything the streets told me was cool to do/Now I’d rather prove it to myself before I prove to you/I hate I fell in love with thuggin’, I give my mama anxiety.” On “Needing Something,” he tightens his slurry wheeze into an anguished singing voice: “All this pain make me sing songs/Ain’t no love in the sewer that I came from.”
Elsewhere on the album, like on “Testimony” and “If I’m Lyin, I’m Flyin,” he sounds regretful, rapping with a heavy head about God trying to set him on a better path. But given what’s happening in his public life, what isn’t there is almost louder: any sort of understanding of what it’s like to victimize someone, or be a victim.
There is no shortage of opportunities to speak about these issues in public settings, however, and Kodak’s recent promotional tour around the release of “Dying to Live,” which took him mostly to radio stations, provided several chances for him to be engaged by interviewers.
That’s what happened on the Hot 97 morning show “Ebro in the Morning.” Host Ebro Darden began the conversation by mentioning Kodak’s various criminal cases but then pivoted away from them into an interview that had all the comfort of a trip to the principal’s office. In one moment of a generally unrevealing interview, Kodak was comfortable enough to display reflection: “I don’t really believe in karma, but I feel like the world, it don’t favor us, so I gotta, like, stop, like, living and thugging so hard, so the world can soften up around me.” A moment later, he added, “A good tree ain’t gonna produce no bad fruit.”
This was the Kodak that appears in his music: self-aware and concerned with consequences. It was the perfect moment for Darden to introduce a challenging line of questioning, but instead, the conversation retreated to the banal. Only at the conclusion did Darden return to the subject, while never directly asking Kodak a question. “We take sexual assault here serious,” Darden said sternly, then followed with an invitation to return and discuss it at a later date.
Kodak looked disoriented. Moreover, he appeared surprised that the allegation would be even alluded to in an interview, as if no one around him had suggested it might. He brusquely walked out.
In other interviews from that week, the allegations did not come up. Kodak’s talk with the Breakfast Club, on the Hot 97 rival station Power 105, was much more jovial, including banter about safe sex and child support. On the podcast “A Waste of Time With ItsTheReal” — which opened with a direct statement that Kodak wouldn’t be asked about the allegations — Kodak again revealed striking insight into navigating the gap between perception and reality: “Sometimes they make you feel like criminalized and all that stuff. Sometimes they make you feel like you worthless and stuff, so when I see people really like shouting, and trying to take pictures, screaming, I be like, damn, me? Like for real? I’m from the projects. Like, me?”
Missed opportunities, all of them. Part of this has to do with the norms of the day — power has tilted heavily in celebrities’ favor when it comes to press: Media outlets routinely make ethical sacrifices to secure big names. Kodak communicates with his fans via Instagram, and generally, that is enough for him; being asked uncomfortable questions is something he hasn’t learned how to manage. It’s a circumstance that allows young artists to experience great success with little friction and, possibly, to remain successful while holding skepticism and inquiry at arm’s length, or pretending it doesn’t exist altogether.
That wasn’t always the case, however.
It was especially pointed listening to the Kodak Black album and observing its rollout in the wake of the recent Lifetime documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly,” which details allegations that have long trailed the 52-year-old R&B; singer: that he targets underage women for sexual relationships, deploys emotional and physical abuse against his partners and leverages his power and stature to silence his victims.
The scope of Kelly’s alleged transgressions is vast and spans decades. Kodak Black is accused of one sexual assault. But the R. Kelly series underscored the changing ways in which performers hide, both in their public life and in their art.
“Surviving R. Kelly” reminds us how throughout Kelly’s ascent and troubled run, the media kept the allegations in the public conversation. There is footage from three televised interviews with Kelly: In 2002, after a sex tape that appears to show him urinating on an underage girl leaks; in 2008, after he is acquitted of child pornography charges; in 2012, pegged to the release of his autobiography. The interviews are awkward, and Kelly is deflecting in each of them. Nevertheless, Kelly faced public questioning, in a time in which television — and media in general — held more sway over an artist’s public image. Kelly’s reply when asked directly if he is attracted to teenage girls — “When you say ‘teenage,’ how old are we talking?” — remains indelible, much as Kodak’s blunt dismissal of Darden and abrupt departure, captured on video and spread widely online, will.
But perhaps the more meaningful lesson to be extracted from “Surviving R. Kelly” has to do with Kelly’s strategic use of music as a character witness. Kelly deployed the godly alongside the carnal, the romantic alongside the lustful; during eras in which he was being vilified, he often used music — “I Believe I Can Fly,” “Step in the Name of Love” — as a means of cleansing his image in real time.
And then there is Kodak, haunted by his demons and gifted at sharing. But his capacity for reflection is a similar distraction — a glimmer of maturity that holds out hope but is only a glimmer. To be vulnerable and also cloistered, mature and also naive — it is possible for both things to be true at the same time.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.