EST Gee: Numbness

If EST Gee’s denial of sensations is real, he's made himself unfit to exist in an art form toned by thrills and impressions. Contrary to his recurring byword and testament to emotional numbness, his music, like most hip-hop, still induces feelings. Whether evoking fear, misery, curiosity, or some of the more formless sensations, rap has always been an emotional sensory test.

His recent project, “I Never Felt Nun” is self-awareness gained in the present time, likely through attempting to maintain the integrity of his 2020 tapes, “Ion feel Nun” and “I Still Don’t Feel Nun.” But these adages could be many things; a self-diagnose with emotional narcosis, a cry for help, a reminder that pain is less felt when less acknowledged or indulging a culture that has been desensitized to painful phenomena. Pain is no good if it does nothing for us, and hip-hop reminds us to always cash in on it.

Trauma is gold for artists. In “I Can’t Feel A Thing,” which is the closest to a title track as the project gives us, Gee confesses, “thankful that I’m blessed with pain, at least I get to feel sumin’, 99.5% of the time, s*, Ion feel nun.” Rappers create from a place of the same pain they convince themselves is obsolete.

EST Gee has been blessed and cursed with the hallmark rap story that starts from bullet wounds and ends at record deals. After being shot five times in 2019, his mother passed away of leukemia the following year, and his brother was murdered shortly after. His grievous posture leaves little room for anything heard from his mouth to be questioned for its veracity. He boasts proudly of being "deep inside the belly of the s* these N*s rap bout."

A life of tragedy has become a requisite for good art, and Gee has taken his calamity to recording studios to bury lurid coke tails and vivid raps about bullet wound surgeries and various automatic pistols beneath horror film trap beats.

The authenticity and picturesqueness of his art caught the ear of Memphis’s Yo Gotti and got him signed to CMG early in 2021, and $750K in cash likely revitalized dormant emotions for the former football standout.

Since then, Gee’s troubled street stories and detailed drug chronicles have solidified his spot in the same class as the more grim and authentic gangsta’ rappers. He now sits with Jeezy, Tee Grizzley, and Mozzy, a few rappers cut from the cloth of authenticity. The booth is more of an interrogation room where these artists daringly spill their stories of pain, iniquity, horror, and triumph through I assume deadpan stares.

Any emotional dullness felt throughout “I Never Felt Nun” is offset by an assist from fellow Louisville natives, Jack Harlow and Bryson Tiller. They provided relief from the feeling of being weighed down by anxiety in the same way as watching cartoons after horror films.

During the project, we witness Gee confesses experiencing the contentment of vengeance, the grief of those who were casualties of street violence, and drowsiness from promethazine and codeine.

To express at all is to feel. Gee has mastered the art of expression, particularly through such an emotionally vacant genre of hip-hop as gangster rap. Anything that deviates outside of anger and inches closer to speaking with the anxiety of not knowing, fails to fit the mold.

In “Voices In My Head” he sorrowfully groans “I’m popping meds laying in bed tryna wake up dead. Instead, I wake up aching staring at my ceiling fan.” But this only resembles a page or interlude in the entire book, a quick passing moment of sober thoughts and solemn introspection. But pain is needed in these kinds of stories as if the scars are what makes them believable.

In “X,” at the track’s climax, Gee passionately attested to his trajectory on which he brings authenticity back to gangster rap. “I’m a chill giver. Thrill liver. I brought back that feeling in the industry for real n*” He understands his place in the industry, the path his story has put him on, and the faces of the ideas he’s regurgitating.

Hip-hop is where tropes can run far and follow an artist for their entire career. Gee might approach the same obstacle Future’s persona left him stuck behind. His bruiser-like presence and cocaine and promethazine raps have the potential to become more of a concept or expression than reality in the eyes of fans.

We tend to create caricatures of the things we fear or can’t understand, to make them more digestible. Like a devil with a pitchfork and red tail. In the same way, we dilute sugary drinks so they’re more consumable.

In the last 3-5 years, the future has been knowingly labeled the “​toxic king” and made crafty efforts to fit the mold. Gee might be expected to, throughout his career, embody the person within his expression; the man overly familiar with death and dead to his God-given feelings. Fans will confine an artist to their stage presence, like costumes we force them to wear. And make first impressions stick like radio hits. We can control what we consume because we can indirectly manipulate it in this way.

Rappers express freely or sometimes believe they are, until they glance at the strings attached to their arms and witness they’re just, truthfully, subject to puppeteers.

In hip-hop, feelings are our inspiration. Rap is rarely void of emotion, but rather fueled and sustained by it. Our feelings are the keycard to accessing our creativity. Numbness will subsist, but we may never make it into the room by which we really escape the haunting of death and violence. We’ll be stuck with them, and our art will be laced with grief and darkness.

Gee’s music has managed to pull him out of this darkness. Death, bullet wounds, and violence have all inspired apathy rather than sensibility.

​We experience flashes of sensation in this album, alerting us that the gold of emotional awareness lies beneath unreadable facial expressions, death, trauma-ridden rap lyrics, and amoral storytelling. EST Gee is no stranger to sensibility, and it doesn’t matter how dreary his music is, or how dark for all of us. I’m eased when reminded that, in the end, Everybody Shines Together.