But in that weird accidental way, The Chief feels like it’s arriving right on time. The Chief, Jidenna’s first album, comes nearly two years after “Classic Man” blew up, a classic example of a major label missing an artist’s buzz window. These days, seeing Jidenna dance in the background of Monáe’s old videos feels a bit like seeing DJ Khaled standing around in a pink polo in the “Lean Back” clip. He went to Stanford, worked as a teacher, and then eventually made his way to Janelle Monáe’s Wondaland crew. He formed a rap group called the Black Spadez when he was attending a fancy prep school. When Jidenna was five, gunmen robbed him and his family and shot him in the foot. Jidenna says that he only adapted his dapper style in 2010, after his father died, and that it’s a tribute to the way his father would wear a three-piece suit and carry a cane everyday. His father was a Nigerian professor, a computer-science expert and a former activist in the Biafran movement during the Nigerian Civil War. Jidenna was born in Wisconsin and spent much of his childhood in Nigeria and then the rest in Massachusetts. “Classic Man” is a cartoony song that only hints at Jidenna’s whole story, which is fascinating. “Gotta be ready for war,” Jidenna crowed - while, in the video, wearing a bright white suit that made him look not even remotely ready for war. But as sticky and euphoric as the song might’ve been, it still had things at stake. Its sound was so bright and sunny that you might not have noticed the crime-life allusions that Jidenna, its singer, was making until maybe the 15th listen: “Breadwinner filling up the pantry / Now my niggas sling cane like a dandy.” This was a song that pretty much ruled my summer 2015 a drunken late-night backyard party where “Classic Man” was on eternal repeat is one of my favorite memories from those months. An ode to dressing and acting in courtly and old-school ways, “Classic Man” rode a sample of the blippy Mustardwave beat from Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” a song that would seem to be the opposite of all of that. “ Classic Man” is such a weird, great song.

Jidenna the chief album listen