Eddie Gonzalez and Kevin Durant talk Kodak Black’s new album, Back for Everything, on the latest episode of Boardroom’s “The ETCs” podcast.
Click here to listen to the full episode.
Less than two minutes into Kodak Black’s fourth studio album, Back for Everything, he asks a question he’s surely been asked innumerable times before.
“Kodak, why you always got pain in your music?” he raps on “Let Me Know,” the album’s opener. “I be feelin’ like I gotta sing to get through it.”
For his staunchest fans, including Kevin Durant, that’s precisely what makes Kodak one of the most celebrated acts in modern rap. “You can feel (the emotion) in the music,” KD said on the latest episode of Boardroom’s “The ETCs” podcast. “He’s gifted.”
While critical acclaim is nice to have, those gifts are manifesting into commercial success for Kodak Black as well.
This week, he topped Billboard’s Artist 100 Chart – essentially, their rankings of the country’s most popular artist based on streaming, radio, and video metrics – for the first time in his career. And while the 60,000 equivalent album units charted in its opening week weren’t enough to overcome the Encanto soundtrack’s current run of chart dominance, it was enough for a respectable No. 2 debut on Billboard’s albums chart. That big week also helped push his latest hit “Super Gremlin” to its new peak of No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart as well.
“He’s trending in the right direction right now,” KD said before diving into his prowess as an emcee. “I feel like every bar is thought out and placed properly. He really learned the skill of rap.”
Maybe the masses have finally tuned their ears to Kodak’s unique twang and approach to the art. Perhaps the chart-topping dose of his style we received when Cardi B famously rode an interpolation of Kodak’s first single of his career, “No Flockin’,” to the top of the world when she dropped “Bodak Yellow” in 2017 helped. But after a roller coaster of a career that included several jail stints, Kodak seems to be doing things his own way these days.
“Everybody has that unique style, you just gotta get used to him,” KD said. “Yeah, he slurs a little bit and might be off-beat just a tiny bit. It’s raw.”
And that rawness — the sheer emotion Kodak Black felt his fans noticing enough to address two minutes into his latest work — is exactly what makes him stand out and now has him elevating to new heights.
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