Two of $ilkmoney’s best qualities as a rapper are his obvious love of words and his commanding presence on the mic. While psychedelic mushrooms are one of his muses, he’s just as intoxicated by language, as evidenced by his predilection for dense lyricism and long-winded titles. The Virginia MC rhymes in double time throughout his new album, Who Waters the Wilting Giving Tree Once the Leaves Dry Up and Fruits No Longer Bear?, making sure that his intensity remains at the forefront.
For all $ilkmoney’s technical skill and attention to lyrics, though, the album’s production stands out just as much as his voice. Drawing on boom bap and chipmunk soul, the music stirs in ideas from Roc Marciano and early Kanye but takes them in exciting new directions. Electric pianos and R&B vocals intermingle with fragments of noise, while the drums tend to be soft rather than central to the tracks in more typical hip-hop fashion.
On “Prolly Wouldn’t Be Here If We Woulda Killed That N*gga King Bach,” the samples speed up and slow down to disorienting effect. Many of the album’s tracks begin and end with spoken-word soundbites, providing a glimpse into $ilkmoney’s mind, which spins with memories of poetry, movie dialogue, church sermons, Black liberation rhetoric, and other artists’ songs.
$ilkmoney’s lyrics are thick with tough talk: “You want to die, I’ll let you choose the room,” he raps on “Ooops, Honey I Shrunk Myself with the Honey I Shrunk the Kids Ray and Crawled into Your Dickhole by Accident.” And he often alludes to the state of politics: “I got the gun that killed Shinzo Abe,” he declares on “There Are Hills and Mountains Between Us, Always Something to Get Over.”
Opting to keep his private life private, $ilkmoney adopts the voices of characters throughout. He casts himself as a vengeful gangster, an elite member of a secret society, and a pimp on “The Unnerving Presence of the Black Hand,” “Fuuuuck Baby, You’re So Sexy When You’re Terrified,” and “Bigfatjellydachildaawg Luvahluvah,” respectively.
Despite few autobiographical details, though, $ilkmoney sounds lonely or dejected at times. He paraphrases the Geto Boys’s anguished gangster anthem “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” on “The $400 Cheeseburger from the Window Shopper Was Just a Big Mac”: “I sit alone in my more-than-four-cornered room/Staring at incense and light fixtures and doing shrooms.” Even the beats sound drugged, pitch-shifted as though the track is spinning in and out of tune.
$ilkmoney reserves some of his most ferocious disses for other Black performers, from Jonathan Majors to Jay-Z, whom he deems as sellouts. “We Snuck the Hammer in the Tunnel and Din Een Need To” takes aim at the music industry more broadly: “Sell you to the highest bidder, and you’ll never see your residuals again…We in the business of owning n*ggas.”
While his machismo can be trying, $ilkmoney represents a dying breed of rappers who view hip-hop as music made by and for rebels. As much as Who Waters the Giving Wilting Tree relies on attitude, it never feels one-note or settles for mere edginess. Yes, the words are important, if hard to suss out on the first few listens, but so, too, is $ilkmoney’s rapid flow, which mingles anger and excitement so inextricably that they’re impossible to pry apart.
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