Vault Chapter 04 — Illest of Our Time 🔥

If Sick Boi was diagnosis and defiance, then Illest of Our Time is resurrection. It’s Ren as outlaw poet, tearing through genre and expectation with surgical precision and a punk-rapper’s snarl.

The Clockwork Defence

The video unfolds in stripped-back industrial spaces – all concrete and decay – with a visual energy that nods heavily to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The theatrical menace, the gang dynamics, that unsettling mix of violence and vulnerability. Even the way Ren addresses us as “brother” in the lyrics echoes the droogs’ twisted camaraderie. It’s not subtle, and it’s not meant to be.

In my years working in mental health, I learned to recognize the signs when someone’s building walls out of words. That opening salvo – “Spitting bullets on the beat / I’m a sick little puppy who gets lucky when he speaks” – that’s what it sounds like when you’re running on adrenaline and refusing to slow down long enough to feel what’s underneath.

Ren opens this track at full sprint. The wordplay comes so fast it’s almost dizzying – Freddy Krueger, Demigorgon, Mary Poppins, Robin Hood all crashing into each other in the space of a few bars. It’s brilliant, absolutely. But it’s also exhausting to maintain. Anyone who’s ever talked themselves through a panic attack or kept their brain busy to avoid darker thoughts will recognize the pattern: keep moving, keep clever, don’t stop long enough for the doubt to catch up.

Clinical Language as Armour

What’s fascinating is how Ren weaponizes clinical terminology against itself. “Psychopathic tendencies, a pathologic entity” – he’s using the language that’s been used to diagnose him, to other him, to explain him away. But he’s reclaiming it, spitting it back with enough velocity to make it dangerous again.

“Extra terrestrial, tentacles, alien” – he’s not just being surreal for effect. When you’re chronically ill, when you’ve spent years feeling betrayed by your own body, you do start to feel alien in your own skin. The metaphor’s spot-on because it’s lived experience dressed up in sci-fi imagery.

The video drives this home brilliantly – there’s a shot of Ren literally bound with rope, physically constrained, while still spitting these aggressive bars. It’s the perfect visual metaphor for feeling trapped by illness while still having this creative fire burning. The body’s a prison, but the mind’s still rioting.

The Inevitable Crash

Then the mask cracks.

“I don’t feel so well” hits like a confession he’s been holding back for three minutes. Everything that came before – all that fire and fury – suddenly recontextualizes. The manic energy wasn’t celebration; it was resistance. And now the exhaustion catches up.

“Things get slurry, speaking slow / Head in Hong Kong, wonton soup / Is what I have for brains, I know.”

I’ve sat with enough people in crisis to know that moment when the defenses finally give way. It’s usually not dramatic – it’s just tired. Ren captures that beautifully. The cognitive fog, the way language itself starts to fail you, the strange relief of finally admitting you’re not okay. “Call a medic for myself” isn’t just a clever line – it’s genuine.

The repetition of “I don’t feel so well” becomes almost hypnotic, like a vital signs alarm you can’t silence. This is what burnout sounds like from the inside. This is what happens when you finally stop running.

Rebellion as Recovery

But here’s where Ren does something remarkable. He doesn’t just collapse into the illness narrative. The political anger surfaces: “Freedom now has lost all meaning, how can we all be free in a hierarchic breeding ground?”

This isn’t random rage. It’s meaning-making. When you’ve been ground down by systems – medical, social, economic – that weren’t designed for people like you, anger becomes clarity. The personal becomes political. “When I take from the rich I’m in your hood and I’m robbin'” – it’s Robin Hood mythology weaponized for the chronically ill, the marginalized, the ones who’ve been told they’re too sick to matter.

Depression as Teacher

What stays with me, though, is what comes after the crash. “Living with depression is a blessing in disguise / Never second guessing, intuition getting wise.”

That’s not someone pretending their suffering doesn’t matter. That’s not toxic positivity. That’s someone who’s done the hard work of integrating their experience into something meaningful. The illness hasn’t disappeared, but he’s learned to work with it rather than just against it.

This is what we call post-traumatic growth in clinical terms, but Ren describes it better: depression as a teacher, suffering as a catalyst for wisdom. It’s documented in resilience literature, but it’s rare to hear it articulated this clearly, this honestly, from someone still in the thick of it.

“Want to sink into the pupil of my eye / Travel to the corner of my cornea and mind / Look for all the answers that I never seem to find.”

This is dissociative self-observation – watching yourself from the outside, trying to understand your own internal landscape like it belongs to someone else. In thirty years of mental health nursing, I’ve heard patients struggle to describe this exact phenomenon. Ren captures it in a couplet.

Still Knocking

“Banished from the heavens but I’m knocking on the sky” – still reaching, still creating, still here. That’s the real rebellion.

The track ends with the title assertion: “Till then, I guess I’m still the illest of our time.” It’s both bravado and admission. He’s the best (illest in hip-hop parlance), and he’s the most ill (physically, literally). The double meaning isn’t just clever wordplay – it’s the entire contradiction he’s living, performed in three minutes of controlled chaos.

What makes this track essential isn’t just the technical brilliance or the cultural references. It’s that Ren has found a way to make chronic illness, mental health struggle, and social critique into something that bangs. He’s not asking for permission to take up space. He’s not performing inspiration porn for the able-bodied. He’s just making art that refuses to be quieted.