tears of joy turns 5
tears of joy turns 5 today. I just want to say thank you to MIKE for putting this out into the world. I’m not going to review the record with any critical lens – I wouldn’t be the right person to do that – but I want to pay tribute to what is, itself, the most touching musical tribute I have ever heard. I could scarcely name another album that means more to me.
tears of joy was written in the wake of the passing of MIKE’s mother, Anuoluwapo Sandra Akinboboye, and her spirit is unmistakably present in the music at hand. The album is smoky and disfigured, a living, breathing reflection of the things you’re left with after a loved one leaves for good – a brain that can’t fire on all cylinders, some sess to get you through the day, and a world that won’t stop to let you grieve. tears of joy is the sound of a 20-year-old slowly figuring out how to live with a pain he does not deserve.
The point is that you can hear him trying. MIKE’s pen is tender and observant like no other. He constantly examines the tether between the natural world and his raw emotions, finding moments of fledgling beauty amidst the grisly reality of grief. From ‘suffocate’, the line “under the summer rain, my heart glows straight through the mist” is luminescent and powerfully heart-warming. I have never wanted happiness for someone I don’t know more than I have wanted it for MIKE since hearing tears of joy.
In the final minutes of the album, MIKE shares a recording of his late mother saying, by the sounds of it, her final goodbyes. The moment is so intensely personal that it almost feels intrusive to listen to it. It is the kind of artefact that MIKE could be forgiven for keeping private, as, indeed, most artists would. Despite the gravity of the moment, Akinboboye’s voice is filled with a delirious sense of hope and gratitude, and when her attention turns to MIKE, her son, the beauty and heartbreak of her words are nearly too much to bear. I have tears right now as I write about it. But the significance of the recording isn’t just limited to its emotional impact in the context of tears of joy – more than that, its existence reinforces the determination and love that has marked MIKE’s work for the five years since this album. Even when MIKE’s music, particularly recently, has revelled in the joy of creation and community, the spectre of his mother remains his guiding light and purpose. You can hear it on last year’s Burning Desire – “Mama told me bout this curse, how I was not above it / I honor her with every word and never swap the subject” – every bit as much as you can hear it on 2020’s weight of the world – “Walked her out the Earth, just me, a couple nurses”.
Although MIKE may never make a record like tears of joy again, it’s hard to imagine him ever again making an album that isn’t charged with its DNA. tears of joy is an album about fighting for peace in your darkest hour, and it radiates with the sincerity that has come to define MIKE’s music, even since the successes of 10k, Young World festival, and recent collaborations at the frontier of underground hip-hop have given him his flowers. Things change, things stay the same. Five years on, we owe a lot to tears of joy.
Sam Gollings
22 June 2024