Fly Anakin is rediscovering his roots in his first full length project, Frank. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, Frank Walton aptly self-titles his first LP that digs into his past simply as Frank, a young, spry verse aficionado in a city and culture with little to no outlet for his creativity. Throughout this project, Walton reminisces on surviving in a culture that frowned upon his individualism, both as a person and writer. The few features on this track are with artists that he was inspired by, or directly influenced his work and perseverance into being called “one of the illest MC’s” by Madlib, producer of MF Doom and a few of the tracks on the album. Through this trip down memory lane, Fly Anakin touches on the topic of race, and how that factored into his upbringing in a conservative Virginia. As an artist, Fly Anakin has only dropped tracks few and far between as singles, at least one a year since 2015. This sparsity has left fans of his sly lyricism and dry vocal tonality watering for more, and there is no doubt that the young rapper delivers not only a neat package, but a hard look on substantial pushback against black artists growing up in the turn of the century.
Fly Anakin opens this monstrous 17 track album with a silky-smooth pallet cleanser in “Love Song (Come Back)”. Walton lays on the pop-R&B thick with a undeniably sweet beat punctuated with a tougher, more cynical look on the purpose of love, rapping “two seats ain’t enough the gang carrying hurt, and work”. This cynical disposition bleeds over a couple of tracks over in the named dropped “Sean Price”, an homage to the late, great rapper. Fly uses the example of the rapper’s influence to exemplify his own, rapping about his personal accomplishments despite the status quo. Rapping with his signature of tempo, almost speech-like style, missed with a silky piano sample that has just as much soul as the lyrics ahead of it, makes this track my favorite of the entire LP. A couple of more tracks over is the first of three so-called “skits”, including “Kenneth Cole”, “Bread”, and “Fly Away”. These close to one-minute tracks feature Fly and his friends and producers shooting the wind, talking about anything from Fly’s inability to pay attention to one thing while browsing the internet, or poking fun at each other for wearing Kenneth Cole jeans. These tracks break the tension between three to four track long suspensions of introspection and serve not only to pad the length of the album, but to establish Fly Anakin’s extemporaneous and cool demeanor. Later, we find the most important feature on the entire album “Black Be the Source (feat. Pink Siifu & Billz Egypt). This song is really where Walton gets into his origins, whilst getting his due diligence in with the allegory of slavery. The first half of the song reads as Fly and Pink’s life as young black men in America, specifically in 2009. The second half of the song features Billz Egypt’s kinder, more empathetic tone of voice comparing with mentions of historical slavery in the U.S. and the harmony that the African American culture continues through shared oppression. Egypt drops what I feel to be the hardest line in the entire album with “hand to hand, any block we sell”. In “Class Clown (Interlude)”, we get a little deeper into Frank Walton as an individual. This track expels the rapper’s fierce loyalty to his hometown, in all of its stains and flaws, rapping “don’t come to Richmond without a permit you ain’t got a pass”. It also serves as somewhat of an anthem for its namesake, class clowns who now find themselves lost because of pedestal-curated directionlessness, no doubt a self-reflection on the rapper. “Grammy Snubnose” is an interesting play on words, and more than shows Fly’s witty individualism. The track is another allegory, this time for the experience of the loss of innocence. Fly uses the event of finding a snub nose revolver (or any illegal paraphernalia) on the ground as a child and launching oneself into a life that there is no coming back from. For him, it is the music industry, and for others, it is the maddening fame and glory that can all come crashing down by simply being “snubbed” of a Grammy.
Overall, Fly Anakin has made nothing new in terms of production value, a nor does he need to. The reach that his singles and features before Frank had is more than enough to give the rapper his voice, and use that voice he does. The larger narrative of the album shows a cool, headstrong approach to the challenges faced in such an upbringing as his, cracking wise and living life to the fullest without ego to show triumph, whist still acknowledging these challenges existence in the modern day, most notably racism. If you came into this album looking for easy listening, I suggest you tune your ears to a frequency that is a little more ready to accept rap as the liberating, storytelling art that Fly Anakin knows it is…
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