"This shit has to be a hit and if it's not, I swear to God I'm going to go crazy,” Aminé says, laughing into the receiver from somewhere in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. He’s talking about “Woodlawn,” a song named after the neighborhood in the Northeast section of Portland, Oregon, where he was raised, and the second track on his new album. “Came a long way from that Woodlawn Park / Now, Young Aminé pushin’ ‘PUSH’ to start,” he boasts over rubbery 808s and a simpering flute sample on the song’s chorus. It’s a nimble anthem of the kind audiences have now come to expect from the 26-year-old artist, but one with a sober backstory. The song is dedicated to a close friend who became incarcerated last year: “It was heartbreaking, so I was trying to make a song for him. I literally played him ‘Woodlawn’ through the phone, and he was dancing in his cell.” It was a bittersweet moment, he says, but in its combination of pop and pathos, the song is characteristic of the career the rapper has forged since his grinning, Habesha visage first grabbed the public’s attention in 2016.
But the four years since Aminé’s career-catalyzing hit “Caroline” rocketed to the top of your summer party playlist (and to #11 on the Billboard Hot 100) feel a little more like 400. In that time, the multitalented rapper has gone from a precocious, gap-toothed provocateur bouncing around in the back of his friend’s Honda to one of popular music’s most commanding and eclectic new forces, as comfortable on a track with lo-fi indie rockers Girlpool as he is with Young Thug. He’s left his native Pacific Northwest, traveled the world, and settled in the land of Erewhon. He’s made music that Rihanna enjoys. He even got a dog.
And after releasing his Technicolor major-label debut Good for You in 2017, and a quick follow-up project in OnePointFive just a year later, Aminé now finds himself on the verge of releasing his true sophomore album. The process hasn’t been without its hurdles.
“To be honest with you, I'm just a really insecure guy sometimes,” he says. “Every album I release, I'm so nervous. Literally, my hands be shaking. Because I be caring about this shit so much.” Having delivered a well-received debut, toured the globe, and won the support of everyone from Scary Spice to Gucci Mane, he’s proven that he’s much more than the banana-loving gimmick some initially pegged him to be. But he recognizes that even a video of Beyoncé roller-skating to your song doesn’t guarantee your spot in the pantheon. In the fickle world of music and entertainment, competition has never felt higher and attention spans have never seemed shorter. But Aminé knows the question for those who truly want to leave their mark isn't “What have you done?” so much as it's “What’s next?”
With Limbo—out August 7—he did just about the only thing a musician isn’t supposed to do these days: He moved slowly. “I have an opportunity to really establish myself, and that's kind of why I took so much time on it,” he tells me. In a moment when a 15-year-old can go from recording dance videos in their bedroom to starring in Super Bowl commercials in a matter of months, it might sound strange to hear a multiplatinum musician speak of establishing himself. But Aminé says that’s kind of the point. “The main reason for Limbo was to let fans know that I don't know what the fuck I'm doing,” he tells me. He says he’s exited the bright, carefree, just happy to be here portion of his early career, and has begun the part where you contemplate not simply the next step but also what you hope the whole staircase will look like. “Now that I’m 26, I think so much more about legacy than I do the moment. I think about what is this album going to mean in two, three years, you know what I mean?”
Aminé’s longtime producer and chief musical partner, Pasqué, says this mindset was at least in part shaped by being from a small city. The pair met in 2013 as students at Portland State University. “I feel like we were always kind of doing our own thing, because I love Portland, but it was really the internet that helped us get anywhere,” Pasqué says. “We really had to branch out.” Back then Aminé hit the ground hard building a digital network and winning key early support from people like Kaytranada. The Canadian producer/DJ sent the upstart rapper a batch of beats that would become a major portion of his 2016 mixtape, Calling Brio, after coming across Aminé’s remix of one of his songs on SoundCloud.
Around this same time, Aminé landed summer internships in New York, at Complex and Def Jam—and according to his friend and longtime tour DJ, Madison Stewart, performed a thorough survey of New York nightlife, tagging along to Stewart's DJ sets—"the entire summer.” Pasqué thinks these summers out east helped refine his creative partner’s vision.“Every time, he would come back [from New York] a little bit more—I don't know how to describe it—direct. It would become clearer what he wanted to do.”
What Aminé wanted to do was make melodic, buoyant, left-of-center rap songs with broad appeal. Limbo represents a notable progression in this creative project. He’s married the bright melodies and pop hooks of Good For You with the trunk-rattling trap he explored on OnePointFive. And while in some of his earlier work his verses could veer toward the dense and staccato, on Limbo his voice is lithe and limber. “Can’t Decide,” a T-Minus-produced Spanish guitar ditty, finds him curving lines and rounding edges like a true R&B crooner. Later on “Easy,” a duet with Summer Walker about the difficulties of securing a lover who checks all the boxes, he confidently takes falsetto duty on the chorus’s two-part harmony. Then there’s “Mama,” where—with the help of Gap Band legend and frequent collaborator Charlie Wilson—Aminé imbues the titular refrain with all the warmth and tenderness of a doting son.
A subtle spectral presence looms over all of Limbo. “R.I.P Kobe. Nigga, R.I.P. Kobe. / You were like a dad to a nigga, so I’m sad, my nigga / Had to get you tatted on me,” Aminé chants forcefully on “Woodlawn.” He says the tragic and unexpected death of the Lakers legend and his childhood idol in January had a profound impact on him. “That was like seeing Superman die,” he reflects. “I was truly devastated. I couldn't stop crying.” It put things into perspective in a way that he couldn’t have predicted. His friend and comedian Jak Knight voices these revelations throughout the album via spoken interludes. “It weirdly fast-forwarded my maturity,” Knight can be heard saying on the track titled “Kobe.” “It weirdly was one of those things where he died and I felt like a lot of my innocence as a young person died.”
Over the last decade and a half, Aminé has watched his hometown slowly experience a death of another kind. Decades of discriminatory zoning practices, targeted “urban renewal” projects, and subsequent rising rents have decimated the black population in what was already considered by many to be the whitest major city in America. Portland’s rapid gentrification has taken a particularly severe toll on the once-vibrant black community in his native Northeast neighborhood. Aminé’s pride in where he was raised is well documented, but now, he tells me, “Going back home doesn't always feel like home anymore.” Seeing images of protesters clashing with federal agents in downtown Portland this past month has only muddied things. When I ask if it was encouraging seeing the “Wall of Moms” and other white-led groups risking their own well-being and standing in solidarity with Black people, his response is tempered. “I think it's a beautiful thing. I'm also genuinely not surprised, but we're also fighting for our lives as Black people in Portland,” he says wearily. “We're fighting for our neighborhoods at the same time. Portland is going to have no Black people in it in the next 20 years, if it keeps moving the way it is.”
The music video for Limbo’s lead single, “Shimmy,” a stunning and stylish romp around the Rose City, feels like a direct rebuke of that dark potential fate. Highlights include, but are not limited to: Aminé in a pea green Arcteryx jacket—a “dead bird flex”—suspended on a climbing rope; Aminé in a Stüssy groutfit with luggage in hand on the iconic carpet at Portland International Airport; an epic drone of shot of Aminé shimmying atop the Oregon Convention Center in a burgundy leather jacket with a fox fur collar; and Aminé and friends storming the streets of Northeast Portland on a fleet of orange Nike Biketown bikes.
“I always wanted to do a Portland video with only Black people in it,” he tells me. While he didn’t quite accomplish that with “Shimmy,” the video still boldly asserts that the face of Portland can (and maybe even should) be that of a skinny, gap-toothed Ethiopian kid.
Aminé has indeed come a long way from Woodlawn Park, but even as the video budgets have increased, he’s only become more grateful for life’s humbler privileges. “When I was 21, I wouldn't call my parents and talk to them for hours and ask about what it was like when they grew up,” he says. “I'm actually saving my income, and just trying to, I guess, be a better son to my parents, and be a better friend to my friends, and think about the small things.” Life in limbo, it seems, can have a strange maturing effect. “I feel like an actual middle-aged adult now, you know what I mean?”
