AJAI II

You know you’re in for a weird entry into the Kenny Dennis saga when an album opens on the jingle for a tanning salon en route to its titular fashion fiend falling into a stream of consciousness millennial hypebeast brainrot. Shorter and more contemplative than its 2020 predecessor, with Kenny Segal’s throwbackpack griminiess swapped out for Child Actor’s lo-fi hauntological haziness, it’s a bit more of a postscript than an all-out sequel. It’s also focused almost entirely on Ajai, with Kenny’s own presence limited to cameo duty (namely an “urban market” variant on the aforementioned tanning salon commercial). That’s no dealbreaker by a longshot — the directionless, embattled ultraconsumer-turned-goods-hustler looking at the end of the line is one of Serengeti’s richest narrative threads. In this role, Serengeti raps like an internal monologue that’s gotten away from him, taking obsessive-compulsive inventory in an attempt to bring some order to a domestic life in the midst of falling apart (“Wake Up Ajai”), until he tries to find a new perspective by channelling Kenny Dennis’s own infatuations on “Kenny Gave Ajai His Rhyme Book” — one persona rhyming as another. That’s a key to the album, the reversals of fortune that the album’s protagonist and his barely-heard acquaintance undergo after first encountering each other, and when closer “Get ‘Em” hits and reveals just how much Ajai’s materialism made him an easy target for conflict, it becomes a lot easier to remember that Serengeti’s got more than just one deeply realized character to examine the foibles of aspirational hip-hop culture through — he’s got a whole world.