Inspired by the likes of Jay Z, Tupac, Biggie Smalls, Naz, Chance the Rapper, and mainly J Cole, Blessing Cummings A.K.A Blessed, is an upcoming artist who is also College student, studying Mechanical Engineering. He plans to seriously pursue both of his interests. Blessed has just dropped his single, “Caged Bird”, to give us a taste of where his musical passion takes him. The characters in Blessed’s narratives tend to be under immense pressure and strain: “I see society is broken in more ways than one. I see a family loses a son. I see the son holding a gun, about to blast because his emotion is numb.” The magnitude of the rapper’s mission on “Caged Bird” is to bring his messages about society’s failures – wasted opportunities, shortsightedness, lack of ambition as well as the fear of self-empowerment and truly being free from the limitations humanity often wants to impose on you.
Blessed’s new studio effort, is also a loose concept about how each choice you make in life will affect you for better or worse, and will have an impact on those around you too. Hence there is no point in living under false pretenses, or suffering the ire of others, but rather to take stock of who you really are, and embrace it.
This seemingly conscious rapper trades in pop rap’s puerile punchlines for hard-hitting lyrics and a powerhouse beat to bolster him. As far as his rapping, he feeds off the solid production work, delivering agile, tight rhymes, while the powerfully sung hook further accentuates “Caged Bird”.
The pacing, flow and lyricism makes this single an engrossing listen. Blessed is cracking open his mindset all over this thing with vigor, unravelling strands of his thoughts as he was completing the Rings of Pandora. It’s as bold and as hard and as hopeful as it is bursting with vitriol. It’s as distracting as it is inciting.
It’s as cohesive as it is dense. It’s a volatile incitement to stand up, and be counted. “Caged Bird” is a metaphor, an expletive shouted out to society, a judgment of our own judgments, a wrestling with our insecurities, and a warning of our inadequacies.
For a lot of people, life isn’t a choice; it’s a sentence. Blessed tells us it’s the exact opposite. And that it’s our fear of making choices and wanting to be free in every sense that condemns us to be sentenced.
“Caged Bird” is a massive, eternally memorable song, and I’m not fussing over the grandeur of the presentation, but just about the artist’s thoughts which speak for themselves. Blessed has delivered a bold statement: one that’s deceptively simple appearance belies the countless things going on just beneath the surface.
OFFICIAL LINKS: SOUNDCLOUD – INSTAGRAM
