Nolan the Ninja is an emcee and producer from Detroit who has been making some noise over the last five years, with a collection of mixtapes, beat tapes, EPs, singles, and albums to his name in that time period. He caught quite a few ears in this time period, including Mello Music Group, who announced his signing earlier this year. He now makes his debut on the label with his latest album, SPORTEE.

If you’ve not listened to Nolan the Ninja, SPORTEE is a good place to start, since it gives you a pretty well-rounded look at the artist. One of the most interesting aspects of Nolan on this album is the way you can hear different influences coming through. You can certainly hear the lineage of Detroit artists like Dilla, Slum Village, and Black Milk, but there’s also this mix of ‘90s East and West Coast influences that makes things especially interesting. There’s a side to Nolan that’s playful and jazzy, with vocal lines and production that bounce around and move effortlessly the way that remind me of the way that Slimkid Tre and Imani from the Pharcyde would rap like they were improvising trumpet and sax solos. There’s also a side to Nolan that is gritty, raw, meditative, and given to narrative in such a way that really reminds me of Mobb Deep. However, it’s the way that Nolan brings all of these influences together and makes them his own that makes this album compelling. The only thing that holds me back from enjoying this album completely is the ways in which Nolan can’t seem to shake some internalized misogyny and homophobia. On the album, he features some badass women, such as Latasha and Boog Brown, and in fact it’s on “Ties,” with Latasha that he drops a chorus about how it was his mom and his grandma that taught him everything he knows, and that his father never taught him shit. At the same time, though, you have a song like “Morals,” which features a chorus that says, “I got a question: What your morals look like/Mine are decent, I was raised right.” This all sounds good, except that the first verse features the cringe-inducing lines, “Pussy n—-s oughta pull down the skirts or just disperse/I ain’t got no time for thug ass n—-s carrying purses/Next thing you know, they’ll be doing a fucking curtsy, yo.” We can debate whether or not Nolan realized how lines like this would come across outside of his immediate circle, or what his intention was when he dropped these lines, but the fact of the matter is that this type of language perpetuates unfortunate stereotypes and hurts people, regardless of intent, and it’s frustrating that in 2019 that bars like this take an otherwise enjoyable album and make it a compromised listen at best.

Nolan the Ninja has a lot of talent, and there is a lot of creativity and emotional content on SPORTEE that are incredibly rewarding. However, it only takes a few ignorant lines to take all the good things about an album and drop the whole listening experience down a few notches, and that’s exactly what has happened here. Hopefully Nolan can learn and adjust going forward, because I think he’s better than this, and I’d love to be proven right.