Song to Get You Through the Week: Louie Gonz cuts deep with 'Drift Away'

One of Worcester rapper Louie Gonz's great strengths as an artist is an ability to portray the demons that haunt all of our minds without either appearing weak or self-pitying. There's a plainspoken quality to the way he approaches subjects which both acknowledges those demons' power and also allows the listener to empathize. That's definitely the case on his most recent music video, “Drift Away.”

Here, Gonz is digging into a painful family history, beginning with a sung refrain: “And what you know about you mother always getting drunk/and what you know about your family always giving up/so many problems on my mind while I roll this blunt/rest in peace to my father/I’m goin live it up.”

While these might not be the particulars of any one listener's past — as Tolstoy wrote in "Anna Karenina,” “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — but painful histories are common enough that the song is eminently relatable.

What's more, the video plays to the image of Gonz seated, looking out the window of an animated spaceship. In the window, vintage photographs of what are obviously the persona's family cascade by in a slideshow. The symbolism is pretty clear — the person is set for the stars, but even that's not enough to escape memories of yesterday's pain and heartache.

Gonz demonstrates a great deal of verbal dexterity on this song, all of which helps maintain the sort of melancholy blues that underscores the whole thing. He moves from a sort of level singing to a tightly wrapped rapping style, which then slows so as to turn each lyrical turn into a rabbit punch. The result gives the song a great deal of texture, and make the song's emotional content vividly real.