#c.t. robert

Photo by C.T. Robert

BY JORDAN MAINZER

“To those who came before and never got to see it through.” That’s to whom Saba dedicates Few Good Things, both his upcoming 3rd studio album and short musical film directed by C.T. Robert. Donning the album cover is a picture of his grandfather, the same voice that introduces the film and appears throughout the record, along with the voices and images of many others. Without knowing that context, and the first time I watched the film, I found myself asking, “Who are these folks?” but then realized the answer didn’t matter. Saba’s incredible ability to make something universal out of telling his family’s own story shines through on Few Good Things.

Saba was raised by his grandparents on the West Side of Chicago; the remarkably gifted rapper, producer, and multi-instrumentalist started playing piano at age 7, began high school at age 12, and graduated at age 16, releasing his first mixtape at age 18. With a penchant for storytelling at the level of Kendrick Lamar, he gave us his debut album Bucket List Project in 2016; though he had gained notice in the Chicago scene through his Pivot Gang musical collective and was featured on Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book single “Angels”, it wasn’t till his debut that he first really started gaining national attention. His breakthrough masterpiece and sophomore album CARE FOR ME (SILY’s number 3 album of 2018) was unfortunately born out of tragic circumstances, the murder of his cousin and Pivot co-founder John Walt. Though he stayed active in the years since, Few Good Things represents his first foray into truly making sense of it all. Yes, he reflects on the violence that begets violence leading to the death of his closest friends and family (including DJ SqueakPIVOT just last August), as well as the institutional violence of racism and redlining that spawned the white flight and property devaluation of the neighborhood where his grandparents grew up. But he’s also letting his family tell their story and adding his own experiences to the lineage as a sense of pride and triumph.

Few Good Things album cover

Throughout Few Good Things, Saba tries to not answer, but pose questions: What is home? What is memory? In the film, sped up slideshows of pictures give us brief glimpses into his family. The mix of real pictures and actors, playing seminal roles like his grandparents, toys with the shakiness of formative memories. Indeed, not only is Saba murky on his family history, but any childhood memory naturally becomes hazier as you get older. Families fight. Words fade in and out. The stability that his grandmother’s house represents--his grandfather’s family was the first black family in the area before a quick bout of white flight, and they stayed there for decades thereafter--is taken when his grandmother dies and his grandfather is forced to sell the house that represented home for more than just its immediate occupants. According to Saba, he never felt close to the rest of his family till Walt died. (In the film, shots of a candlelit vigil are juxtaposed with the gorgeous off-kilter hi hat beat of the song “Simpler Time”.) In a sense, Few Good Things is presented linearly, starting decades prior with his grandfather’s narration and eventually revealing how gang violence grew increasingly present in the neighborhood, and ending with present-day Saba, albeit realistically looking back and what he and his family have accomplished.

Perhaps the most unexpected thing about Few Good Things, given the seemingly normal album campaign leading up to its release, is that the album and the film were essentially done in conjunction. One isn’t secondary or even a companion piece to the other; they are one. After the film was debuted via Moment House on Monday, during a discussion panel with Brandon ‘Jinx’ Jenkins, Saba and Robert revealed that the project represented for both, something they had been wanting to do for a long time. For Saba, it was making a short film, the art form having been mastered by so many of his hip hop forebears. For Robert, it was a film about nostalgia, memory, and daydreaming, something he had tried to do prior but failed. The project allows people to inject their own story into it, providing a blueprint for Black folks to reconnect with their families. That is, though many can relate to Few Good Things, Saba explicitly stated that while his non-Black friends have the luxury of an identity and culture of knowing where their family came from, the reality is that many Black people can’t go back that far, due to the horrors of the slave trade and slavery. Still, Saba has stories of his grandparents coming to Chicago from North Carolina and Texas, and the areas where his grandparents grew up (even before the house that he called home on the West Side) provides a similarly powerful elation, seeing evidence that he came from somewhere, or as Jenkins put it, what it means to have lineage or family heirlooms.

This isn’t to say that the album fails to stand on its own. As much as many snippets of its highlights take on a new life in the film, the music itself is both cinematic in scope and varied in tone and genre. That Saba has found so much success, critical and economic, allows him to take care of his friends and family. “They wished upon a star, I caught it like I’m Randy Moss,” he raps on opener “Free Samples”. But such responsibility doesn’t go unfelt. With impossibly limber flow on the G. Herbo-featuring “Survivor’s Guilt”, Saba anxiously bounces back and forth among the various viewpoints and eras of his family: “My father told me that the world was mine and I believed him / My momma said I was a heathen / My grandma was the one to feed us / I’m the one that paid my sister tuition, I should probably go to the meetings.” Plus, as much as he has anxiety about staying relevant in the rap game (as evidence by lead single “Fearmonger”), his fears are existential, too. “This Chicago: When you leave, we say, ‘Be safe’ here,” he raps on “An Interlude Called Circus”. And on “Soldier”, Saba expresses the rush of thoughts coming to him when his partner’s about to bring a baby into the world. All of these worries contextualize a song like “Stop That”, which reminds me of Lamar’s “Backseat Freestyle” in that it seems like a brag banger on its own but is really a way to pump himself up after a life of external forces trying to bring him down.

It’s the end of the album and the aftermath of the film that underscores the main message of Few Good Things: reach out. During the Q+A, Saba shared how he finally realized that, as the most visible member of his family, he’s the one who has to make the call. Everyone else assumes he’s too busy at any given moment, and he probably is! On emotional centerpiece “Make Believe”, he raps, “I didn’t know before I learned as much as I love to perform at the show / It’s the people close I gotta show up for” and then “Yea they put a mil on the table / But my granny really put meals on the table.” Even if the monetary opportunities do enable Saba to improve the quality of life for his family, they don’t guarantee life itself. If “relationships are a collection of memories,” like Robert wisely said during the Q+A, the last two tracks on the album, “2012″ and the title track, serve to underscore the importance of little moments in Saba and others’ lives. “Good things come in few,” he raps on the latter. There’s the sanctuary of his grandmother’s house and Saba’s first love interest. None other than The Roots’ Black Thought delivers his own family history verse on the title track, before Saba takes us out: “Glass half full / The other half was emptiness / We turned a bunch of nothing into abundance.” Even if good things come in few, the implications of the few is much greater.

Lastly, there’s a lot to be said about how this project was made during the pandemic, a time when many of us couldn’t physically see our families. Glancing at the Moment House chat during the film screening and Q+A, apart from real-time reactions to Few Good Things and its new merch line, or attempts to collaborate by dropping Soundcloud links, one common theme among commenters emerged: The project made folks want to reconnect or talk to or interview their own families, about their histories and about their lives today. “This album is a life project,” Saba said during the Q+A. “A promise to make the call.”