JID Is a New Father and Uneasy Messiah

At 34 years old and with 12 years in the rap industry, JID finds himself matriculating from a student of the game to a leader. As he does so, the title of his fourth album, God Does Like Ugly, suggests he’s looking to the ultimate one. Despite the enormous successes of a four-times-platinum appearance on Imagine Dragons’ “Enemy” (a pretty random collaboration from the outside looking in), a viral hit with 2022’s “Surround Sound” (which soundtracked videos where netizens held their phones high above them to rap, dance, or act into the camera), and many years of packed shows, JID is less a superstar than a cult-classic type of rapper. It’s clear he’s a bit over that. “Just took a fuckin ‘ceiling challenge to show I’m above my peers,” he spits with slight disdain on his God Does Like Ugly. “Be serious.” 

JID has made a career of looking at the bigger picture. His last album, The Forever Story, came out nearly three years ago, powerfully retelling his coming of age out of Atlanta and onto J. Cole’s prestigious Dreamville Records, and describing how his family has showed up in his life along the way. The very last seconds of God Does Like Ugly reveal that he’s now started a family of his own, with JID asking, “Daddy got best bars in the world?” to a baby who gurgles back a definitive, “Yes.” This is likely his first public announcement that he’s now a father, putting him in one of the most consequential leadership roles there is. So, when JID proclaims his capacity to step up, whether he’s humbly distancing himself from Dreamville by rapping, “I ain’t killing shit cause of Cole/It’s cause I’m cold,” on “VCRs” with Vince Staples, or promising, “You need a leader/I can come and deliver,” on the single “WRK,” there’s an added sense here that in his personal life, he must.

But, of course, titulary, and functionally, God Does Like Ugly also finds JID asking and answering the metaphysical questions embedded in that process, musing on what the hell we’re doing here on Earth, who’s in charge, and where we go when it’s all over. His observations are rooted in the Christian traditions that permeate the Black American south where he was raised. “I’m tryna free the shackles/My brother back inside the cell so I just said a prayer,” he raps on “Glory,” an early declaration of JID charging himself to be some sort of spiritual guide towards the people he cares about — whether that’s his troubled sibling or Black people more generally. No matter what though, his perspective is local, as he recounts the only-in-Atlanta trials of getting his car robbed outside a Falcons game (in the excellent “Gz,” a prime example of what a hyper-specific storyteller JID can be and his mesmeric sense of cadence) or being hunted by city’s oppressive Red Dog policing unit that brutalized Black people from the late Eighties to the 2010s. If Metro Boomin’s recent A Futuristic Summa mixtape revels in the sugary pulse of the city’s hip-hop movement that came at the end of that era, God Does Like Ugly lives in the dark underbelly that was always there.

While some of JID’s religious allusions can be too on the nose — like summoning Westside Gunn, known as FlyGod, for the intro, or Atlanta rap hero Pastor Troy on “K-Word” — the album really shines when JID juxtaposes the promised salvation of Christianity with the grit of Atlanta’s reality. “At the Lord’s service like I’m working a job/Black mask shawty robbin’ people in Cobb,” he raps, skillfully balancing a set of what seem like contradictions on “Glory.” “Playin’ Crime Mob, he a child of the corn/Take him into court and on the Bible he sworn/Take him into church, you know yo mama and ‘nem goin’,” he adds. The production warps choirs and tambourines into his own sort of gospel. JID also compellingly muddies capitalistic success and real transcendence throughout the album, pointing to money as a false god. “Even seen the preacher on the TV tell me ‘Send us 19.99’/And he can save our souls,” he notes on the striking “Of Blue,” peppered with graceful beat switches. As a personal testament to how easy and tempting it is to follow the fake idolatry of cash, he also often juxtaposes how well he lives now through rap with some of the harder times he’s been through, noting people have had to turn to more nefarious means to change their own fate: “Far cry from bugs and cereal boxes on the shelves/Now I order escargot on a plate, it’s a fuckin’ snail,” he says on “YouUgly.”

The album’s title is JID reconciling that all this “ugly” — desperation, poverty, pain — happens under God’s watch. On a pamphlet announcing that he would be playing shows for just $1 in anticipation of the project, he wrote, “God loves you right where you are. Broken or whole. God does like ugly.” It’s a sentiment he repeats on the intro, lamenting his brother’s constant incarceration. In the face of this, JID relays that, “You can only control what you can control,” as he wrote about his inspiration for the single “WRK,” but also fiercely acknowledges that the options presented are pretty grim and often predestined. “Community,” featuring Clipse, is one of the best portraits of this, as JID joins Pusha T and Malice as seamlessly as a third brother to color in shrewd vignettes of run-down apartments full of people who have had their families and agency taken from them, caught up in a justice system from crimes of survival. “My mama said we gotta get away from them apartments/It’s graves in them apartments/And it ain’t gotta end this way, ‘cause we ain’t start shit,” says a pitched-down voice in the opener. 

Despite its meticulous narrative cohesion, God Does Like Ugly is by no means an easy listen, lacking the smoother and more unified sound of The Forever Story, his discography’s most impressive entry. (As he ushered in this new era, JID revealed that he spiraled after Forever went underappreciated — then joked that the hurt feelings only lasted “for maybe 20 minutes, ‘cause I ain’t no bitch.’”) GDLU can feel disjointed in a way that works well if you liken it to a movie score, but is less endearing as an album experience. Take the homage to Atlanta roller-rink culture “Sk8,” featuring Ciara (who has become a go-to for such things, also appearing on Latto’s “Good 2 You”). With its upbeat, retro bounce, it’s sonically jarring in the context of the album, but also introduces ideas of romance and friendship that are interesting pockets of levity in the otherwise brooding soundscape. This is similar to “What We On,” which spends its first minute and 45 seconds being a boring Don Toliver song before JID breaks through. His verses there and on “WRK” go on to commit a common offense for JID: As an incredibly dexterous and athletic rapper, he can be wordy for wordiness’ sake, a tendency that has also fatigued fans of one of the legends he’s looked up to, Eminem. This is all to say, the album itself is often kind of ugly — which actually might be part of the point.