by Hugo Reyes (@hvreyes5)
Written early in the pandemic, Jackie’s House was created as a way for rapper Joshua Virtue to materially support his family. It was obvious even then that our government's measly 1200 dollars was only a bandaid that wouldn’t even cover a month of rent for many people. As of November, over 200,000 people in Chicago are housing insecure and that number only stands to go up. Virtue’s bars are a reflection of a reality of insecurity, making what I would call anxiety raps.
Even with the anger, this is the ultimate love letter one can give to another -- that is using one’s art to materially support each other, spitting in the face of a capitalism centric view of art. I keep on returning to the second to last track, “12 Billion Dollar Wulongi.” It’s one of those tracks that synthesizes so much of what lies at the center of this album without trying to so explicitly. There’s plenty of lines throughout the song but a stray line from Ruby Watson always sticks out for me in the best way. “Trying to fight for the voice of care and love/Socialism from the bottom.”
At the heart of Jackie’s House is a palpable sense of joy, encouraging the audience to replay the record as soon as the closing track “Trade Joe’s” ends. In between a spurt of lines, Virtue says “And I’m in love with every human I’ve ever known.” It grounds the record as a humanist work and ultimately documents a time that feels quaint in retrospect -- when the pandemic was still a novel concern and we were unaware of what would lie ahead for 2020.