Release Date: 31 January 2025
Song Count: 24
Duration: 47 minutes, 39 seconds
Rating: 4.5/10
Description:
The world of underground rapper Michael Jordan Bonema, also known as simply MIKE, is one of inspiration, colour and intrigue - the man lived in several influential cities in the east coast of the U.S., including Philadelphia and NYC, as well as abroad in the UK, and founded a collective of alternative hip-hop artists named Slums alongside five other rappers. His seventh album, Showbiz!, is an exemplary work that showcases the full extent of his creativity, ingenuity and craft, and does so in bulk, containing 24 entire shorter but complete tracks within it.
All sorts of instruments and sounds swirl around in the backing compositions of the album's tracks as MIKE's smooth, collected rap flow carries through the entire runtime. The sound of jazz instruments and old-time samples meshing together gives the songs an almost esoteric, self-made sort of feel, as if stitched together by hand into a symbolic art piece. The beats topping these things skew significantly towards a slower tempo and a kicked-back energy, all-around framing the output of the album to retain a consistent sense of tranquility in the specific manner that underground rap tends to invoke.
Whilst the atmosphere provided by Showbiz! conceptually sparks plenty of interest and is decent at inducing its desired effect, the record ultimately did not do enough to carry its own weight in any other aspect for me, and the tracks ended up falling into a lull of being listenable yet ultimately unmemorable. Even with songs one could consider "highlights", there is a significant lack of a unique tinge to identify or anything similar to mentally hold onto as a way to etch their melodies and such into one's brain, and I overall found myself rather unimpressed with this specific work. Still, it is clear that MIKE is a talented artist full of ideas that, with different album structuring and an additional effort to let the tracks differentiate between one another, could come into fruition much more nicely.