There’s no shortage of the advice in song form that’s telling you to not take life laying down. Life seems to be an obstacle course that everyone must face, and the radio gods are obligated to play at least one song a day with some chart-topping motivational cliché. The challenge is making a song about growing as a person feels like a human is experiencing it and not just a motivational poster.
Seattle hip-hop artist JC Flow takes a more introspective approach on “Still Becoming”. Instead of presenting healing as some triumphant, neatly packaged conclusion, the song focuses on the uncomfortable business of figuring yourself out while you’re still very much in the middle of the mess.
Based around atmospheric, cinematic beats of hip-hop, “Still Becoming” allows for JC Flow to wrestle with his emotions. The verses share that quiet intensity of emotion, that consideration of continuing on with life as if everything is all right. That’s a strange vulnerability, because life doesn’t wait to roll out the red carpet with a chorus in the sky for you to understand your purpose here. Sometimes, you just move on through the day and see what tomorrow brings.
And this is the message at the heart of the song. The title itself throws out the idea that becoming a better version of yourself is an end goal. It’s a journey and a pretty uncomfortable one at that. You can have your wins and still be feeling pretty shiteful. You can know where it hurts you without knowing how to fix it straight away. JC Flow seems happy to take the contradiction, rather than pretend he’s figured it out.
His music settles in between the alternative rap, soulful rap and inspiring music quadrant. It’s cinematic in the production but poetic when it’s performed and it really does embrace the introspective side of this track. It’s heavy but it’s not so much that it’s restricting and the melodies really come in to help give this song that bit of comfort in a dark moment.
Definitely, inspirational hip-hop can suffer from the same leaden fault: the more sincere and explicit the song, the closer it comes to preachiness. “Still Becoming” works best when it stays in the word “yet”; refusing to rush on from the discomfort to the comfort.
“Still Becoming” is likely not going to solve motivational rap, but it’s much more humble in its approach to becoming better than yourself. There’s no cheat code to healing, no one track to get you ahead in this personal development game, and there’s no promise that tomorrow is any easier than today. Maybe all you can do is come to terms with today.
And honestly, that’s a much more useful message than pretending you’ve already made it.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
