Mick Jenkins - The Healing Component - 2x LP Vinyl

The cover to The Healing Component features the heart as it beats in the human chest. The organ is exposed, precious, vital—only ever a beat away from the end of a life. Jenkins’ album arrives in the backdrop of the shooting death of Terence Crutcher at the hands of police in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Not to mention black men and children killed in Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge. The rapper might preach love throughout—“Spread love, try to combat the sadness,” he demands on the title track—but he sounds like an optimist desperately reaching for the broken shards tearing away from his soul. This might be one of year’s best blues albums.

Jenkins broadly pitches love as humanity’s “healing component” as taught to him through scripture. “That’s what Jesus was down here to show us,” he tells an anonymous friend on one of the record’s segues. Inevitably, a record this much into religion will be stacked next to fellow Chi-Town lyricist Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book. But while Chancelor’s record came with a wave of saintly Christian sentiment, Jenkins engages with faith as a weapon to scorch America’s white patriarchy.

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