Voices swirl around a plaintive piano line at the beginning of “Heavy Hearted,” the first song on Blue Hunnits. Fingers run through chimes. Before the beat drops, Cam Kashier is already talking.
“We were scraping change for lunch / Been through a lot of shit but that just made me tough / Product of my environment so my ways were stuck / When you really from the bottom, only way is up,” he raps.
The beat comes in, subterranean at first, then big and wide. Kashier keeps talking. About sweeping up the barbershop in the hopes of getting a haircut. About how he should visit his grandmother more often. About his regrets about some of the choices he made when he was younger. He’s looking back now, and sifting through it.
“Ain’t seen my daddy in, like, 20 years / I be picking his brain to see who he really is / I done heard enough stories, they gave me many fears / But I wanna talk about the shit he really did.”
That’s one side of the New Haven-based Cam Kashier. Then there’s another side, the biggest man in the room. On “$uper Trapper,” the beat gets propulsive and Kashier’s expletive-laden flow bangs over it. “Tone It” takes it down only a little bit, with Kashier weaving in and out amid Auto-Tuned vocals, a bouncing riff, and a bedroom drum track. They’re the kinds of song that might sound weird in your living room, but it plays great in a club, everyone bobbing at once, hands in the air.
Those two sides are both front and center on Blue Hunnits. At first listen, you could say the album almost has multiple personalities because of it, as a meditative track gives way to a banger, then gets quiet again. Which one is the real Cam Kashier? The answer: both of them. Over the course of the album, a fuller portrait emerges of the man with the microphone. He’s a man who’s made mistakes, who has been on the wrong side of the law. A man who’s done and said things that he regrets. But also a man who can be the life of the party. A man working to be a good son, and a good father.
The seriousness of intent is clear in the album’s production, which draws from the dominant, electronic sounds of trap but also makes room for crooning voices, lilting piano, even an old-school sample or two. Blue Hunnits isn’t an album Cam Kashier made just for his friends to listen to; it’s a calling card for a wider audience. Kashier makes it as plain as that on the moments on the album when the two sides come together, to show not just who he is, but where he wants to go.
“I’ma go do all the shit that I said that I can / Was younger but now I got focus, I got me a plan / I’ma go get it for me, I’ma get it for Cam / Still Mami’s little boy, but to them I’m the man,” he raps on “Issa Vibe,” which marries a funk guitar sample with a icy-cold drum sample. It’s a statement about his ambitions to make things better, for himself and for those around him, and it’s not just in the words; it’s in the plaintiveness and honesty in his voice. You hear it and want it, too.
