by Spencer vonHershman

Prolific Chicago hip hop artist Serengeti has woven his way through over thirty releases, a heavily-developed character persona and collaborations with artists from all over the independent music spectrum. His new album ‘AJAI’, produced and mixed in it’s entirety by Kenny Segal, is some of his best work yet.

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With a career now spanning nearly two decades, it still does not feel like ‘Geti receives his credit as an established veteran of independent hip-hop. Maybe, part of that is self-imposed. To this day, his most popular song to a large degree is the 2007 Chicago love letter ‘Dennehy’, a light-hearted track accompanied by a goofy video (even co-opted by the Chicago Bulls themselves as promotional material in 2019). It’d be easy to check out a few of the rapper’s early tracks and see the skill but not foresee much additional depth, but Serengeti is flexible artist. For every release like the Odd Nosdam-produced ‘Kenny Dennis LP’, named after his turned-up-to-11 Chicago persona, any other release could be a hard left turn to a different direction. The 2011 album ‘Family & Friends’, a three way collaboration between Yoni Wolf (WHY?) and Owen Ashworth (Casiotone for the Painfully Alone) is a heavy and endlessly real release where you learn about Serengeti’s real background outside of his sunny portrayal of the good parts of Chicago life in many other releases.

So where does ‘AJAI’ fit in? Somewhere comfortably in the middle. There’s no outward parodies here, just Serengeti in a comfortable laid-back overdrive. Yes, ‘Ajai’ is a character and the record could be considered a concept record. Serengeti has either developed an intricate, fully realized personality or he’s taken his own and ramped up the anxieties and insecurities ten-fold. Ajai is a fashion-obsessed slacker “comedian” who is living in the shadow of his successful wife and constantly underperforms expectations, letting both of them down. Serengeti has a unnatural talent when it comes to his wordplay that has allowed him to carry many sub-standard instrumentals in his career, but Kenny Segal’s production on this effort is both endlessly creative and absolutely pristine. He raps about his wife even more than Kanye, will still roll on a crafty hook and namedrop designer brands, only to go off on a tangent about softball or the grocery store. Each song is a manic slice of life taking you on a new journey. The one-two punch midway through the album with ‘check kenny’ and ‘elaine’ see the MC effortlessly flexing over two of the most complex, hard-hitting instrumentals on the release. On the latter track, only Serengeti could hear that instrumental and decide that it was the perfect soundtrack to spin the tale of his trip to the grocery store and hanging out with his neighbor Elaine. He also manages to say ‘jars of ragu’ at least three times. The production on this record cannot be understated, though a highlight especially should be fixated on the mixing. Segal could have chosen to make this entire record crystal clear, but decides to creatively mix in static, lo-fi filters on certain vocals and hard chops to turn a beat fully on it’s side. It gives all of the songs extra life. With Serengeti already going a mile a minute, it’s sometimes hard to keep up and you will miss great one-liners without additional listens but it becomes a gift that keeps on giving.

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As of right now, there is no published announcement of an official release for ‘AJAI’ - it is only available via Serengeti’s Bandcamp page. You can also find more works by Kenny Segal here, including one of my favorite releases of 2018, ‘happy little trees’.