X calmly eyes his mirrors and window. I feel X’s younger brother, CJ, tense up in the back seat behind me. The cars drive ahead, one veering off to an exit beside us.
“We’re good, it’s all right,” X says assuredly to the rest of the car—and maybe himself—before turning to me in the passenger seat. “You got to be prepared for anything.”
The idea that achieving fame and fortune can be an albatross just as much it can absolve you is a well-worn theme in rap music—but you’ve never heard the sentiment phrased quite so succinctly as it is on “Take Care”: “When it get better, it get worse.”
That line, spoken at the end of the album’s title track outro by Wallo, the media personality and patron saint to street rappers, encapsulates the record’s core theme. What follows is a collection of songs that find BigX grappling with his newfound status and the pitfalls that come with it: jealousy, paranoia, anxiety, and, most crucially, time away from his still-small children. The intro track has the amazing anti-flex: “Each city I find a new hater.” By the following song, “Lost the Love,” X is admitting, “Sometimes I be wishin’ a n-gga ain’t make it / ’Cause this shit gets rough, but the bag a li’l different / Sometimes I just want to wake up and go missin’ .” Track five is literally titled “Therapy Session.”
He’s still skating over hard-hitting beats that sample everything from Rick James to the Whispers (the same flip that Will Smith used for “Miami”), but tap in closely with the lyrics and you’ll find X getting more personal than some fans might have expected this early into his career.
“I really ain’t had no choice,” X says of getting vulnerable. In true artistic fashion, his first instinct was to stay guarded, of course. He recorded the aforementioned songs and immediately deemed them too raw to ever actually present to the public. Once his team finally got through to him that to shelve tracks this good would be insane, a theme started to take shape: If he was going to go there, he was going to go all in, leaning in to a year that put him through the wringer.
