Open Mike Eagle : Neighborhood Gods Unlimited
Imagine you’re a copy editor or work a section desk at the Daily Planet, and nobody else seems to acknowledge the truth about Clark Kent—which should be patently obvious. When Metropolis is in peril, he’s nowhere to be found, which is honestly a pretty terrible habit for a beat reporter. And it doesn’t take unusual powers of observation to see that he bears a passing resemblance to the guy who actually shows up, but with no glasses and his red underwear on the outside. On “My Co-Worker Clark Kent’s Secret Black Box,” a standout moment from Open Mike Eagle‘s Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, the L.A. rapper—looking through the eyes of one of Kent’s colleagues—is getting a little fed up with the gaslighting. “He’s weird, and he acts distracted/He be here, and then he has to vanish,” he observes, increasingly irked by the fact that nobody’s willing to call it out for what it is. “This is some bullshit…Why y’all be trying to act like y’all don’t know who that is? This is fucked up.”
Neighborhood Gods Unlimited is a summary of what it feels like to constantly live with sore shoulders from having to bear the weight of the world, whether through the indignity of having pieces of yourself owned by another third party or the inability to shut off all the voices echoing in your head. Presented as a cable channel that can only afford to broadcast one hour a week—Dark Comedy Television, a nod to his 2014 album of (almost) the same name—the album flickers through one tightly written sketch of trauma from an enshittified world after another. It’s vulnerable and frequently hilarious (I audibly chuckled the first time I heard “Clark Kent”), its sympathetic vignettes delivered over gently hypnotic productions that act as stunning music beds for Mike’s surrealist yet crucially relatable cable-access programming.
What initially seems like a life-changing revelation in Mike’s repetition of the title of the warm, soulful “Woke Up Knowing Everything” reveals itself as a trip through the ill effects of having access to every idea at once. Misinformation overflows at a barbershop discussion of chemtrails and stonecutters and “Mercury in Gatorade,” while the second verse takes a dire turn with a cold dose of reality you wish you couldn’t know: “Every illusion ends when the state kills a citizen.” And the crack of a phone screen becomes a shattering of self on “OK But I’m the Phone Screen,” where Mike mourns the loss of everything he never thought to back up in the cloud: “I lost all notes/Rap voice memos to turn into demos/I started ideas for like eight or nine songs/And some of ’em was two minutes long.”
Though the exhaustion and frustration is near constant, Open Mike Eagle and his collaborators craft their share of hypnotic and soothing productions that provide the mercy of a soft landing. Kenny Segal’s beat on “Contraband (The Plug Has Pieces of Me)” is rife with jazzy guitar licks, while Mike and Playa Haze lend an organ-laden groove to “Almost Broke My Nucleus Accumbens,” and August Fanon graces the lounge cool of “Mirror Pieces in a Leather Bound Briefcase” with a mesmerizing twinkle of vibraphone. The eminently listenable and lush sound of Neighborhood Gods Unlimited lends an extra dose of comfort to an album-length reassurance that you’re not the only one who’s going through it. It also bolsters Mike’s expressions of gratitude on “Relentless Hands and Feet,” and the insistence that no matter what gets thrown his way, he’s determined not to let the avalanche of nickel-and-dime aggressions hold him back. “I’m fighting self-doubt to walk this street/And the city’s trying to get rid of me,” he raps. “But I ain’t leaving till I’m paid to.“
Label: Auto Reverse
Year: 2025
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