Jidenna plays the capable rapper, the classic soul singer, and the Auto-Tuned hook-man, shifting styles and genres at a moment’s notice. The eagerness to show listeners every single thing Jidenna is capable of results in some great songwriting, but in execution, it’s a breakneck race through half a dozen genres, and sometimes two or three within the same song. The wait has rendered it both accomplished and a little impatient. Today’s new The Chief is the culmination of a two-year singles campaign and the decade of study and practice that preceded it. Instead of blanketing the single and mixtape circuit with new material, advancing his profile based on whatever stuck, he carefully set about expanding on the world “Classic Man” unfurled with a series of follow-up singles alongside Atlanta singer-actress Janelle Monáe’s Wondaland Arts Society collective that matched its careful balance of smooth sonics and coarse thought, if not necessarily its commercial windfall. What do you do when your debut solo single cruises past a million units sold? Jidenna’s patience in devising an answer speaks to a certain poise. This slow ascent is proof the man didn’t arrive classic instead he whittled his aesthetic down over time and breached the public consciousness with it sharpened to a point. Pre-fame performance footage exists if you know where to Google.

Jidenna is a Nigerian-born, Ivy League–educated schoolteacher by trade who, as he once told Spin, got into rap by force of intellectual curiosity. If you listened close, there was a verse about what to do about police brutality. Tyler’s rager explained Odd Future’s teenage riot in a single blast of disdain for self and others, but Jidenna’s single pulled off a more nuanced feat, sneaking revolutionary rhetoric into the margins of what seemed to be an innocuous pop jam while presenting a vision of black pride and self-sufficiency in its visual component. You’d have to go back as far as Tyler, the Creator’s “Yonkers” to find a song that maps out the artist’s aesthetic so cleanly for a casual listening audience on a first pass. “Classic Man” was something else: lead single as political Trojan horse, music video as ideological calling card.

Jidenna the chief album