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Portland is going to have no Black people in it in the next 20 years, if it keeps moving the way it is.We've maintained totally free domestic shipping since we opened in 2018 and have no plans of changing it. “We're fighting for our neighborhoods at the same time. I'm also genuinely not surprised, but we're also fighting for our lives as Black people in Portland,” he says wearily. 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. 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. Portland’s rapid gentrification has taken a particularly severe toll on the once-vibrant black community in his native Northeast neighborhood.

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. Over the last decade and a half, Aminé has watched his hometown slowly experience a death of another kind. 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.

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. “Can’t Decide,” a T-Minus-produced Spanish guitar ditty, finds him curving lines and rounding edges like a true R&B crooner. 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. He’s married the bright melodies and pop hooks of Good For You with the trunk-rattling trap he explored on OnePointFive. Limbo represents a notable progression in this creative project. What Aminé wanted to do was make melodic, buoyant, left-of-center rap songs with broad appeal. It would become clearer what he wanted to do.”

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The process hasn’t been without its hurdles.Īround 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 a little bit more-I don't know how to describe it- direct. He even got a dog.Īnd 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. He’s left his native Pacific Northwest, traveled the world, and settled in the land of Erewhon. 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. 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.īut 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. 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.

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. “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. 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. '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.