NF - The Search (2019)

With a persona modeled after Eminem’s, the Michigan-born star of Christian rap recently notched his second No. 1 album. But to most of the secular world, he’s a ghost.

While most of the hip-hop universe spent last week breathlessly debating Chance the Rapper’s event album The Big Day, that record was quietly outsold by an act almost completely off the radar of the general public: Michigan rapper NF, whose The Search became his second consecutive No. 1 album. NF has cemented himself as the biggest Christian rap star since Lecrae, and yet even with a No. 1 pop song under his belt—his sentimental 2017 crossover hit “Let You Down”—he’s a ghost to most of the secular world. Rap radio doesn’t play him. The music press barely acknowledges him.

It’s no mystery where NF’s following comes from. He’s a lyrical, white, and Christian rapper in an industry where all three identities can provide a fast track to a devoted audience. It doesn’t hurt that he models himself after perhaps the most successful white rapper of all time: Eminem, whose brooding persona and twisty delivery NF copies with the reverence of a 16th-century Japanese painter replicating the masters. Like Eminem, NF draws from his traumatic childhood, never shying from ugly thoughts or inner demons. And like Eminem, he’s from the technical school of rap, where the height of artistry is cramming as many syllables and as much internal rhyme into each bar as possible, nuance be damned. The only real daylight between the two is that NF doesn’t swear.

NF also shares Eminem’s shrillness and distorted sense of volume, rapping like he’s putting on the world’s loudest Punch and Judy show. He spends much of The Search darting in and out of an overbearing rappity-rap snarl-yell that can cut right through you if you don’t relate to his roiling anger. “Last year I felt suicidal, this year I might do something different like talking to God more,” he roars on “Change,” as the track unleashes sheets of Imagine Dragons-esque thunder, swelling like a gospel song. Later, “I Miss the Days” makes the gospel connection explicit with an actual choir.