Love Me As I Am review: pain rap’s ambivalent master”>
Nino Paid. Photo by Kofi Ansah-Agyei
Trying to pin down the sound of hip-hop from the DMV is like trying to determine the quality of water: it depends on the source. It can be filled with evil dirt, like the music of HavinMotion and other DMV crank artists, or crystal clear and ready to be guzzled after marathon sex in a penthouse suite, like Brent Faiyaz’s globe-conquering sonics. It can be a great flood that sweeps up sonics (Lil Xelly) or as avant-garde as an oasis in the middle of an active industrial lot (Jaeychino). Love Me As I Am, the new album from the 23-year-old Prince George’s County artist Nino Paid offers its own dimension: as cold as an ice pack, pressed against a split lip suffered from another lost battle with life.
Nino Paid’s breakout songs, while still in the realm of pain music, refused to march the beaten paths of stars like Rod Wave and YoungBoy Never Broke Again. August 2023’s “Heart Eyes” is built on a skittering sample of Faye Webster’s “I Know You,” a sweetener for Paid’s bitter bars of opportunistic girls, fake friends, and his flawless street credentials. But that same month’s “Pain & Possibilities,” with its beat as desolate and groovy as a Massive Attack demo, saw Nino more closely show us the pieces of his broken heart, digging deeper into the specifics of his struggle: “Long live Cap, long live Ronnie and Webey / I’m finna put bro on this chain / It’s lookin’ like everybody gone / We was just thuggin’ in school / How the fuck we let everything change?”
The change Nino abhors goes beyond abandonment and death, but his shifting creative appetite, first showcased on last year’s debut full-length Can’t Go Bacc, is one of his biggest assets. Even within that project’s dominant mode — plugg beats with Nino’s overlapping, crank-adjacent flow — there are subtle shifts: “JB Couch” offers a more chest-puffed version of Nino’s usually dim-lidded and confessional delivery, honed by therapy sessions that began at the age of nine. “Be Ok,” a distorted rage-jerk track produced by OsamaSon’s go-to guy wegonbeok, is the obvious sonic outlier, but “When I Was Young” sees Nino offer an origin story as vivid and tragic as anything you’ll hear in rap in 2024, a cinematic depiction of a life derailed by foster care abuse. When he raps “I had three siblings coming up, so it’s crazy how they split us up / But if anybody named Raekwon and you hearin’ this, lil’ bro, what’s up?” it sounds like he’s throwing a bottled message into an ocean that’s long since dried into dunes.
The rap industry is perhaps the worst place for Nino Paid to find the stability he craves. Love Me As I Am reckons with this fact, gathering energy from the tension like a slingshot. “Tears in the Hotbox” featuring JRipey has a calloused guitar line that makes it one of the best emo-rap songs in years: “Maybe I’ll find something I can’t lose, maybe I’ll lose something I don’t need / Maybe I’ll reach my dreams, get rich off rap, start a family somewhere and just leave,” Nino raps. He carries this weight across the album’s songs, his tone enough to satisfy old fans even as he searches for new sonics and pockets.
After the breakout success of Can’t Go Bacc, Nino unsurprisingly spends some time on his new project making poppy overtures. “Try Me,” where Nino enlists Tommy Richman to bring some of his “Million Dollar Baby” spice, provides adequate flexing, while the deep fried jerk of “Cooln,” produced by the red-hot streaker PlaqueBoyMax, nods to the ascendent underground sound that’s all over your teenaged cousin’s For You Page. Similarly, you could easily imagine “Tyreek Hill,” with its hypercolored cloud-rap beat that all but shouts out Imogen Heap, soundtracking one or two viral TikTok moments.
Nino sounds comfortable in these tracks, and no pain rapper wants to spend their entire career rehashing their plight; eventually, even the eyes of those who seek comfort can feel like they’re leering. And even if Love Me As I Am serves as a moment of transition, Nino still has a lot of gas in the tank that made him famous. “Joey Story,” an unflinching narrative of the suicide of a lonely friend who was chasing wealth. It’s Nino Paid at his best, music that taps not just a depressing vein, but an existential one: The feeling that life is a farce of endless chasing, where the only respite is luxurious distractions.
The phrase “can’t go back” is scattered across Nino Paid’s discography. Even outside of the first album’s title, he mutters it across songs, including those on Love Me As I Am, as a sort of ad-lib. Life has changed so much for Nino: Fans now ask him for pictures on the streets where before he’d be left alone, but he can provide for his family. His success keeps his incarcerated friends warm, but there are few people on the outside he can trust. Is “can’t go back” tragic or celebratory for Nino Paid? It’s both, and on Love Me As I Am, the ambivalence is more heightened than ever. Nostalgia and trauma function in tandem; the album’s motivating moments are implicit reminders of darker times, and the depressing ones reveal the flower bulbs pushing through the blood-spattered snow.
