Getty Image/Merle Cooper
“Chicago is a town, a city that doesn’t ever have to measure itself against any other city. Other places have to measure themselves against it. It’s big, it’s outgoing, it’s tough, it’s opinionated, and everybody’s got a story.” — Anthony Bourdain
The Grammy Award for Best Melodic Rap Performance has required a certain malleability to sustain itself, mutating in form as the years have passed, much like commercial rap music itself. The statuette was first handed out in 2002 as Best Rap/Sung Collaboration and just look at some of the nominees from its first two years: Eve and Gwen Stefani, Nelly and Kelly, various songs that feature one or both of Ja Rule and Ashanti. These were glorious duets that paired an emcee and singer together in the hope of achieving significant MTV traction; tentpole hits in what looks more and more like a classic era for pop music with each passing year. But the category needed to shed the prerequisite that nominated songs required two distinct performers when more artists began blurring the lines between both disciplines. From 2018 to 2020, it was called Best Rap/Sung Performance, before changing once more to its current iteration.
What Grammy voters envision a “rap/sung performance” or “melodic rap” to be has meant the award has been a happy hunting ground for more pop-oriented rap artists. I’ve witnessed intense forum debates on whether Drake’s “Hotline Bling” is a rap song. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What is for certain is that Drizzy’s mammoth hit single is the kind of tune that perfectly fits what the Grammys are looking for here — “Hotline Bling” triumphed in the category in 2017.
This year, voters have a chance to give the award to a rapper who has long used melody not in the pursuit of mainstream acceptance, but to create music that sounds doomed and desperate. I’m talking, of course, about the man who wears Chicago rap’s crown of thorns, Lil Durk, nominated for his single “All My Life,” featuring J. Cole.
Durk’s first outright Grammy nomination (he previously guest appeared on Drake’s double-nominated “Laugh Now Cry Later”), “All My Life” is three minutes and 43 seconds of gospel-tinged upliftment, making it pretty atypical of his vast archives. The rapper is closely associated with the Chicago drill scene and has arguably overcome Chief Keef’s head start to become its most popular ambassador. But while Keef once represented the Mephistophelian chaos of the adamantine-hard genre, Durk’s music boasts a richness, both in detail and emotional resonance, that has made him a man apart.
Durk rose out of his city’s South Side when the area — much like South Central, Los Angeles in the 1990s — was becoming associated internationally with street violence, and the term “Chi-Raq” was entering the popular lexicon. In this backdrop, Durk has been Chicago’s Didion, his words offering a lens into what he calls “the trenches” and a deeply American brand of urban chaos. He covers poverty, violence, and loss with a sage-on-the-block wisdom of this socio-economic nightmare.
Any number of Durk’s songs can feel like the coldest story ever told. A minimalist, he generally rejects overarching commentary and instead focuses on single incidents, small details, and those little moments. This is augmented by his ability to create chilly harmonies, utilizing Auto-Tune-doused vocals that bleed like they’ve been cut into by a kitchen knife. Durk is a solid rapper, with a voice that’s clean and youthful. What’s special is his ability to convey the weight on his soul through the dual weaponry of vocal cords and computer software. There are analogues to Durk in the form of Future, Young Thug, and 03 Greedo, but none sound quite as deathly cursed.
Forged in Englewood, Durk Banks is a South Side native, and child of chaos and disorder. He was probably too young to fully grasp the situation when his father, Dontay Banks, was sentenced to life in prison for cocaine distribution after refusing to snitch on infamous kingpin (and one of Rick Ross’s cocaína heroes) Larry Hoover.
Rapping became the son’s vocation. Still a kid, Durk harnessed the power of the internet to build a fan base, but his visibility really intensified as the excitement — and moral panic — around the drill music took off. While Keef was receiving the attention of an intrigued New York Times, Durk dropped Life Ain’t No Joke, a Datpiff classic, in October 2012. Hardship was burned into the title, yet Durk saw melodies in the mayhem. Jordan Sargent observed in his Pitchfork review, “he leans heavily on one under-discussed aspect of drill music: Auto-Tune, and drowning music in it.” This was three years after Jay-Z declared the pitch-correcting apparatus dead, yet Durk made it sound like such a vital tool. Songs like “Right Here” had drill’s crushing concrete beats, with the rapping adding a harsh sense of beauty.
Durk parlayed the hype around drill into a deal with Def Jam. It proved an unsatisfactory union. After splitting with the label, Durk used an interview with Billboard to curse the bureaucracy that stopped him releasing music at his own furious pace: “I never really got a chance to enjoy anything because I’ve been with them for five years.” A half-decade is a long time to be dissatisfied, but the period did yield the singles “Like Me” and “My Beyonce,” certified gold and platinum respectively. Def Jam might not have liked everything about its young star, but it must have loved his ability to use that sense of melody to sing softer R&B jams for mass consumption.
Liberated from Def Jam, Durk opened the floodgates. In 2017, he moved to Atlanta, where he maintained a hectic release schedule, dropping solid tape after solid tape, outliving the public’s curiosity with drill music.
Not just a crooner, Durk can unplug from Auto-Tune and spit raw couplets. One of his most popular tracks, “3 Headed Goat,” from 2020, saw him team up with Polo G and Lil Baby to form a trap King Ghidorah, while on “Chiraq Demons,” he recruited G Herbo for a double dose of classic drill — all horror movie piano keys, crushing drums, and unbelievable menace. It was a reminder that the then-red-hot sounds of Brooklyn drill were a murky thing compared to their crushing Chi origins.
Meanwhile, the sad dispatches from the streets continued. Though his mail might have been delivered to Atlanta, Durk’s narratives were impossible to envision set anywhere but the Chi. Take a song like “Different Meaning”: Snapping awake with a drug hangover, Durk feels frustration that the message of his music has failed to bring necessary change (“I put real life inside this music, they not hearing us”) as he thinks back to texts informing him that friends had been killed, his vocal cords cracking under the strain. Frequently, he’s leaned on his music to both communicate and release him from his own struggles.
In May, 2019, Durk handed himself over to cops after a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with a February 2019 shooting outside of a restaurant in Atlanta. The rap sheet made grim reading: Durk and his protégé King Von were charged with criminal attempt to commit murder, aggravated assault, participation in criminal street gang activity, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. The day after his arrest, Durk released the song “Turn Myself In” to address his legal situation: “False accusations why they name droppin’,” Durk declares. “They wanna know if I’m rapping or robbing/ Taking these drugs for family problems.” The tethering of the news cycle to his music seemed to clarify what we already knew: Durk’s writing was not based in fabrication.
Eighteen months later, with the case still open, King Von was one of two men shot dead outside the Monaco Hookah Lounge in Atlanta when, according to police, an argument between two groups of men “escalated to gunfire.” And in June 2021, Durk’s brother Dontay Banks, who performed as DThang, was killed in a chaotic scene at Club O.
Two loved ones dead, the oblivion of prison hanging over him, Durk continued to work. But this period of darkness was finally laid bare with last year’s release of Almost Healed, the album that houses his now Grammy-nominated single, “All My Life.”
Durk’s never been considered a maker of classic albums, partly because he’s not great at ironing out flaws in his projects for those who might be looking for them, but also because they don’t tend to be distinct from one another. Almost Healed, though, feels like a stand-alone monument and that starts with a title that welcomingly reveals catharsis, plus a cover that invokes the title of Miles Marshall Lewis’s classic hip-hop memoir, Scars Of The Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don’t Have Bruises.
Crucially, Almost Healed was released in the wake of the news that the charges against Durk were dropped. Understanding he’s free from that legal strain furthers the sense that this album represents his attempt to leave his worst days behind.
Almost Healed opens with words from Durk’s therapist — played by, of all people, Alicia Keys. “Can you tell me where was your mind when you heard the news of your friend Von passing away on November 6th, 2020?” she asks. “And then, the loss of your brother on June 6th, 2021. Wow, that must’ve been incredibly devastating. I can only imagine how painful that must’ve been.” There can be no obscuring the album’s intent. The therapist finishes up by demanding, “I wanna hear from Durk Banks,” real name, no obfuscation.
On “Pelle Coat,” Durk sounds wounded as he addresses rumors that he betrayed Von (“Like how I’ma sacrifice Von? I’m the only n***a reached for his hand”). Almost Healed is occasionally spiritual, with various references to Durk’s Islamic faith. Now in his thirties, he has also aged into back-in-the-day nostalgia about his own career. “Belt2Ass” references past pop runs like “My Beyoncé”: “Your Mount Rushmore list can’t fuck with me / Tried to go popstar, had to fuck up the streets.”
Among the most open-hearted songs is the Grammy-nominated “All My Life.” Produced by Dr. Luke, it uses the kind of somber piano line that tends to elicit confessions. J. Cole is not the kind of rapper you’d associate with Durk, but here he serves as a decent adjutant. As Durk explained, “It’s just a rap that’s just showing you what I been going through… We were just trying to figure out like what’s the right person to put on it. ’Cause it’s one of those songs where if it’s not the right person to do the second verse… I feel like Cole can bring the energy that I’m looking for to it.”
Cole opens “All My Life” by setting the scene: “Durkio told me he been on some positive shit.” From there, Durk recalls past controversies, how he leveraged his fame into meeting politicians to try to elicit positive change, and sadly observes, “These days seein’ rappers be dyin’/ Way before they even getting’ they shine.”
Because there’s a cataclysm devastating rap. Among those to be murdered are BTB Savage, YGN Cheese, Yung Lo, and MoneySign Suede. 350 Heem was shot and killed at his own mixtape release party; Gangsta Boo succumbed to an accidental overdose. This is all since the last Grammys.
There is the chorus, without which “All My Life” likely wouldn’t have nabbed its nomination. A children’s choir is recruited, because sometimes that’s what you need to punctuate a refrain like, “They couldn’t break me, they couldn’t break me,” and make people understand you really mean it.
Sometimes healing isn’t a straight, unbreakable process. Forever restless, Durk quickly followed up Almost Healed with Nightmares In The Trenches, a project featuring members of his collective/label Only The Family. A half-hour of steely street raps and fresh reporting, Durk is back to his chief vocation. No statuette is likely to take that urge away from Durk’s make-up. If you’re the kind of person who believes collective achievement should be considered when handing out a gold gong, then Lil Durk’s decade-and-a-half of valuable dispatches should make this Grammy a wrap.
