But it's not the same for a lot of Black people in Portland.” The only reason my parents are still on that block is because, you know, I pay for everything. And now my parents only live next to white people. Aminé alluded to the transformation of Woodlawn on his 2017 song “Turf”: “Flipping through my past like I used to flip the phone / They kicking out the Blacks and all the houses getting clones.” Rapid gentrification continues to gut Portland’s Black community, which accounts for less than six percent of the city’s total population. Woodlawn represents a lot of good memories for me and my friends. It's kind of turned into a hipster park now, but it's definitely the first place I got jumped. “It used to be very much a part of the Black community. “Woodlawn is the neighborhood that I grew up in,” he tells Highsnobiety over Zoom. He stops by Kee’s, a popular soul food truck, and heads to Woodlawn Park, his old stomping grounds located a few blocks from his childhood home.
In the video, he meets up with other members of the Portland rap scene plus Yosief Berhe and Jonathan Ressom, his two friends who co-star in all of his videos, to bike en masse down NE Alberta Street. Just as importantly, “Shimmy” is a subtle homage to the heavily gentrified areas of northeast Portland, where Aminé - born Adam Daniel to Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants - grew up. He stands, perhaps symbolically, on the roof of Mike’s Drive-In (the burger joint where “Caroline” was shot) and trades the Honda for a speedboat zooming up the Willamette River. He cheeses for the cameras while flanked by a phalanx of lawyers and dances midfield at Providence Park.
The video for “Shimmy,” the lead single from Aminé’s forthcoming album Limbo, is a collage of Portland-specific flexes, a tribute to how far he’s come. Paak, Rae Sremmurd, MadeinTYO, and Desiigner also flourished), “Caroline” went quadruple-platinum and helped make Aminé the first rapper ever from Portland, Oregon to become a national star. In that 2016 summer of #BlackBoyJoy in hip-hop (when Chance the Rapper, Lil Yachty, D.R.A.M., Anderson. The video, like the song, is bubbly and carefree it documents Aminé and his friends riding around town in a Honda Sedan stocked to the gills with bananas, lounging around in the grass, and watching each other play video games.
LIMBO AMINE LICENSE
Watching Aminé’s “Caroline” music video can evoke vivid high school memories of the days when a freshly minted driver’s license conferred upon its holder the freedom to meet up with friends and do anything - or nothing. Though not without his signature affable, low-key charm, the Portland rapper's latest finds him in a more reflective, nostalgic frame of mind. In this edition of FRONTPAGE, we catch up with the inimitable Aminé, who has just announced his new album Limbo, out August 7.
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