Respecta.is - The Ultimate Hip Hop Portal

Consider yourself lucky if you can’t empathize with Red Pill. No one channels bleakness better than the blue-collar Michigan MC, whose sophomore solo LP for Mello Music Group, Instinctive Drowning plays out like the ghost of Bukowski on a snarling bender. His songs are lifelines for the doomed, death letters written for fatigued skeptics, the anthems of an existence precariously balanced among a fifth of gin and a loaded .38 revolver aimed at the temple.

The album title doesn’t come from some glib “sad boy” gimmick-it’s an allusion to his unstinting depression and chronic alcoholism. The saddest stories are usually the most honest and almost no one is more honest than Red Pill. His music is his own atheist confession booth. Instinctive Drowning unravels as a litany of fear and loathing: rooted in the worry that his afflictions are genetic. Many others in his close family have suffered their own battles as well. Pill’s own mother passed at 45 from alcohol-related issues. If he ends up next, the album might as well serve as his requiem