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.

  • The video for “Drank on the Block,” directed by A Savage Film

Ali’s story is deeply intertwined with that of Cabrini-Green. Born Aujahnee Wright, the 22-year-old grew up in the complex’s William Green Homes, referred to as the “whites” due to their pale concrete exteriors. From her elementary school, Edward Jenner Elementary Academy of the Arts, she watched as the Chicago Housing Authority tore down the complex—a process it had begun in 1995, years before she was born. By 2011, the CHA had demolished all the high-rises—the whites and the “reds,” nicknamed for their red bricks (and more formally called the Cabrini Extension). Ali and her family, along with thousands of others, were forced to leave.

Her immediate family—her mother, brother, and sister—were dealt a bad hand after they were forced out of Cabrini-Green. After 2011, they moved every year until they secured a Section 8 housing voucher from the CHA. Because the CHA waiting list in Chicago is so long, Ali’s mother and siblings ended up living in Memphis, Tennessee, and later Springfield, Illinois, before their number came up here. During those years Ali remained in Chicago, staying with various relatives—a grandmother, an aunt, her father—until she was reunited with the rest of her family.

On “Drank on the Block,” Ali picks up right where she left off with “No Ending.” The song is somewhere between a banger and a ballad, and she offers half-confessions in her intoxicating blend of rapping and crooning over a tender loop of acoustic guitar and pulsating bass by producer SephGotTheWaves. She acknowledges her haters—the ones who hate to see her succeed and the ones who’ve written off people from Cabrini-Green. “Know they scared to see me great, I’ma still make ’em feel it / Turn them ugly project days all into a pretty living / You wasn’t with us thugging in them trenches / When you ask about Near North, we who they mention.”