Just two years ago, Tara C. Mahadevan wrote a feature on Rapper SG Ali’s then newest single “Drank on the Block,” professing her love for Cabrini-Green. 5/
SG Ali’s new video for “Drank on the Block” opens with wistful, wordless melodic vocals over stills of what Chicago’s Cabrini-Green Homes once looked like—old photos of the high-rises, the last of which was torn down in 2011, and of the row homes that remain.
Shot by Chicago director A Savage Film, the video re-creates a normal day on Ali’s old block. She and her friends shoot dice and pour up—the song’s title and lyrics acknowledge her fondness for lean. “No amount of money ain’t gone heal all this pain / I said I gave up, but I’m still sipping drank,” she sings on the chorus.
Ali attended Carl Schurz High School on the northwest side, and she says the experience helped her take her music seriously. “I was a star,” she says. “I never embraced who I was. So I come to school and kids [were] walking around with speakers and I’m hearing my songs playing. They treated me like my hood did—like I was somebody. But I never really looked at it like that.”Ali began earnestly pursuing music in 2018. “It was my passion. But mostly, my struggle.
Ali’s lyrics make it clear how she feels about this corrosive neighborhood conflict: “They’ll kill they own before the opposition / Money on your head, that’s a proposition,” she rap-sings. “So much shit I seen up in these trenches, all these Ls I had to take / All them smiles I had to fake, ’cause I can’t let ’em see me break / Only so much I can take, sometimes I be losing faith / Ain’t scared to see my day but I just pray heaven can wait.
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