Welcome to Ear 2 Da Sky! Each week, I will be going over topics within music culture and reviewing albums and EPs across genres, eras and artists that are submitted by readers and listeners of my radio show every Monday at 11 p.m. on WHUS 91.7 FM! For this week’s submission, amidst getting lazy on Thanksgiving and staying up to study for finals, I decided to sit down and give MIKE’s “Beware of the Monkey” a listen.
Michael Jordan Bonema, more popularly known as the all-caps stylized MIKE, is a very interesting artist. With ties to New Jersey, East London, Philadelphia and New York City, he sits on a unique niche: the ability to have been truly immersed within different cultures, but more importantly, different musical cultures. This ability to have a worldly cultural view and his afro-centric production — under his appropriately named producer alias “dj blackpower” — come together to create a sound so synonymous with MIKE’s career.
“Beware of the Monkey” is MIKE’s fifth mixtape, released on Dec. 21, 2022, following his fifth studio album, “Disco!,” released in 2021. The project is 33 minutes long, sitting at 13 songs. He starts off the mixtape with “nuthin i can do is wrng,” a great illustration to understand MIKE’s style of production. In a time where samples can seem a bit overused or misused entirely, I personally think his usage of samples is not fully appreciated. Playing a game of verbal “double Dutch” with the instrumental, he intertwines his bars with the samples, but still giving it room to breathe, as it loops the affirmation “Nothing I can do is wrong!”
As one of the more popular songs off the mixtape, “No Curse Lifted (rivers of love),” opens with a voice recording of conversation between him and others, which is a very common occurrence if you peruse through his discography. He shows through his music that he is a friends-and-family-oriented person, as he’ll have skits or interludes on his projects, featuring phone calls from family or advice from friends. Music is a family business for him.
Track 10, “Stop Worry!” is easily one of my favorite tracks from the project. It features Sister Nancy, a pillar in Jamaican dancehall, widely known for her 1982 song, “Bam Bam.” The production for this song is amazing, as it serves as a happy medium between MIKE’s laid back, drawn-out flow and Sister Nancy’s high energy. Following this is track 11, “WEARY LOVE.” dj blackpower slows it down, as he writes about longing, lapses in relationships, arguments and the inability to hide despair. Again, with the production, I truly can’t get over it. The sample, the message, the skit, the small details: it all adds so much to the bigger picture of the song in itself. MIKE lets his emotions pour out over the sample as it cries out the song’s namesake, reaching, pleading and longing.
Listening to any MIKE project, you would probably assume that he has lived a long and eventful life by loving, losing and getting back on his feet thousands of times, as well as living millions of different lives. At the time of writing this, however, he sits at the age of only 26 years old. With every mixtape, EP, single and feature, MIKE is slowly but surely crowning himself — if not already crowned — with the convoluted title of “leader of the underground.” MIKE is an artist that knows no bounds of time, writing from his past lives, leaving us excited for the future.
Rating: 5/5
If you want to submit something to my radio show, ask for advice, hear your music on the radio and possibly even see an album or EPs you submitted get reviewed in the paper, submit it here: https://bit.ly/ear2dasky