Shelved by Elektra Records—ostensibly due to the album's incendiary artwork—less than a month before it was set to be in stores, KMD's Black Bastards is essentially MF DOOM's origin story. It is often hailed as the best rap album that you've never heard.

Black Bastards

KMD's Black Bastards (sometimes stylized as Bl_ck B_st_rds) has become one of the more storied albums in hip-hop, and with good reason—its route to consumer ears was at first barred, then clandestine, then piecemeal and underground. But before the album was even semi-properly released, it, by all accounts, birthed MF DOOM, who is perhaps the most revered, enigmatic popular underground rapper of the past twenty years. It's not conjecture or a stretch to say that the Black Bastards story is DOOM's origin story, and without it there's no Madvillainy, no Special Herbs, no reason for Mos Def to make seven cover videos, no metal-faced Villain getting barred from all bars and kicked out the Carvel.
Originally scheduled for a 1994 release, Black Bastards was shelved by Elektra Records—ostensibly due to the album's incendiary and controversial artwork—less than a month before it was set to be in stores. The shuttling itself was reportedly low on ceremony and dialogue, but the conversation around the album was not. Billboard columnists Terri Rossi and Havelock Nelson had taken offense to the Black Bastards project in separate columns; The Source magazine editor Jon Shecter, meanwhile, rebutted with an editorial titled "Corporate Hysteria", writing, "[A]s we've seen over the years, it doesn't take much for the bottom-line bigwigs of big business to flip on hip-hop. It seems inevitable that the raw honesty of many rap records would offend enough of mainstream America to put the product at odds with the company selling it."
Elektra's decision was based in both fiscal and political realities. Much like Epic Records has abandoned Bobby Shmurda in wake of their sister company Sony Pictures Entertainment's email hack, Elektra washed their hands of KMD in no small part because of their sister label and distributor's troubles. Warner Bros. had already suffered a stinging blow in 1992, when shareholders voted to remove Ice-T's "Cop Killer" from his metal side-project Body Count after protracted finger-pointing and naysaying from then-President George H. W. Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, and co-founder of the Parents Music Resource Center (and future Second Lady) Tipper Gore. This was the struggle that birthed the current version of the black-and-white Parental Advisory label; one that included Dan Quayle pressuring Time Warner to pull 2Pacalypse Now off shelves.
The shelving was the second blow that the group would suffer. A year before, KMD—which had whittled down to a duo, losing Onyx The Birthstone Kid, who performed on their masterful 1991 debut, Mr. Hood—had effectively ceased to exist as a group when Dingilizwe Dumile, aka DJ Subroc, was struck by a car and killed while crossing the Long Island Expressway. Subroc's brother, Daniel Dumile—then known as Zev Love X, now known as MF DOOM—was left to finish the album. It was these twin tragedies that led to Daniel becoming the man in the iron mask; and it's the legend that defines Black Bastards, which is now getting its most glamorous re-release yet, some twenty-one years later.
Given the backstory, it's no wonder that Black Bastards is being treated like a plot device from the Star Wars reboot. This latest reissue fetishizes the album to the extreme—it's a children's pop-up book. (Rare advance copies and copies of copies have existed since the '90s; in 2001 and 2008, it was made available, respectively by Sub Verse and DOOM's own Metalface Records, the latter who is also responsible for this version.) Black Bastards is often hailed as the best rap album that you've never heard, and this newest reintroduction is not likely to change that: It's targeted exclusively towards collectors and archivists—most of whom would already have the music.
Still, it's apropos, given KMD's tone—they released their first album as teenagers and it featured wide-eyed gazes on heady topics, all delivered with the help of excerpts from foreign language tapes, children's audios, Malcolm X and "Sesame Street" characters.

Mr. Hood was whimsical and pointed and prescient—"Bananapeel Blues" hosted a spoken-word mediation on race with a sped-up Gil Scott-Heron sample (from "H2Ogate Blues": "How much more evidence do the citizens need?") that is still embarrassingly poignant today when the cultural spectacle of Black men being murdered by police has become social media snuff porn.
But Black Bastards was so much more and less than its predecessor. It was always a very good record, a promising one—but not a great one. Musically, it sounds like a mid-'90s rap record—copious samples of jazz and R&B over big, dirty drums. It's more angry and less fun that what came before it, but also more intimate and less expansive. Where Mr. Hood focused on the big themes out there, Black Bastards turned inward, dealing with the personal coming-of-age revelations. It's largely the story of two devout followers of Dr. York's Nuwaubianism struggling with the vices of the carnal world. "Sweet Premium Wine" is about their newfound love of alcohol—"I don't drink, I guzzle 'til I'm distorted." On "Contact Blitt", they treat smoking weed the way "Game of Thrones" treats magic— something wondrous but common, like dragons.
At the time of Black Bastards, corporate rap was still in its infancy, and the music industry was deeply entrenched as a trickle-down gerontocracy, one where the voices of power were largely disconnected from the street-level youth that it fed upon. Harder songs on the album, like "Get-U-Now" and "Gimme!", can be seen not only as a response to self and label expectations, but also a document of rap's darkening tone and the rites of passage that both entail. When the album deals with women on "Plumskinzz", it's deeply lascivious: "Damned, I wouldn't want my plum to turn prune/ Unless it be all that, be all that/ It won't matter 'cause black sweet ones come fatter/ I'm kinda, kinda picky with my fruit mix." It's a far cry from the jingly innocence of Mr. Hood's "Peach Fuzz" and as genuinely awkward as burgeoning sexual awareness.
Despite the album's title and artwork, Black Bastards is much less direct about racial politics than Mr. Hood. Where Mr. Hood was incisive and righteous, Black Bastards is searching and confused.

None of this makes it any less worthy of a listen—there's something that's still very real and new about hearing the group move through their emotional spaces. Moreso than listening to the birth of MF DOOM, it's the death of KMD, not just the group, but of both of the guys who made Mr. Hood. And for all of its darkness, there's the unbridled brightness of growing artists still exploring the limits of their medium and textures of their own voices. There's a glee in Subroc's voice when he begins rapping on "It Sounded Like a Roc!": "It's my thing/ Yo, it's my thing/ The way I swing, not even an orangutan can hang/ On my ding! ding!/ Saved by the bell rang/ I talk, yell, whisper, mumble street slang." It's like wacky Nicki Minaj meets To Pimp a Butterfly and it's the kind of rap that just couldn't be released today. Or rather it can. But only in a pop-up book.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Daddy Yankee’s breakthrough album, the unforgettable year of “Gasolina,” and how the Puerto Rican rapper helped make reggaeton a global sensation.

Barrio Fino

Maybe you were at a basement party, grinding with a pimply crush in low-rise flare jeans and a belly button ring you couldn’t stop staring at. Maybe, if you were a little older, you were driving around your city with too many friends in the backseat. Maybe, if you were in the Caribbean, you were at a party de marquesina learning what your hips and ass could do. Maybe you heard it at a middle school dance and felt compelled to engage in the ritual of a preteen dancefloor tryst. Maybe you bought it as a ringtone for your brand new hot pink Motorola RAZR flip phone.
Maybe you were in East Harlem, or Humboldt Park, or Santurce, or a suburban strip mall town in middle America. No matter where you lived, there’s a strong chance that at some point between 2004 and 2005, you heard Daddy Yankee announce his arrival in the U.S. mainstream with a crystal-clear introduction: “Who’s this? Da-ddy Yank-ee!”  “Gasolina” was ubiquitous back then: That shouted hook, revving engine, and indelible, blistering pre-chorus blasted from every boombox, every passing car window, and every iPod Mini.
“Gasolina” was the dawn of an empire. Barrio Fino, the album it appeared on, was the first reggaeton LP to debut at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, spending 24 weeks in the top spot. In 2005, it won a Latin Grammy for Best Urban Music Album. Within a year of the record’s release, Daddy Yankee had landed a $20 million record deal with Interscope, a sneaker collab with Reebok, a Pepsi sponsorship, and a controversial modeling gig with Sean Jean. If reggaeton was going to go global, Yankee was going to squeeze every cent he could out of it. After all, the man got an associate’s degree in accounting so he wouldn’t be cheated “out of money.”
This is the enduring image of Daddy Yankee: genre pioneer, business tycoon, reggaeton king. On Barrio Fino, Yankee presents himself as the commander of a movement that was poised to assume market dominance. But beyond its commercial impact, which is just one benchmark of its influence, Barrio Fino is also a document of a genre in a moment of transformation. This is an album that carries the knotty histories of reggaeton within it—from its origins as a form of protest poetry, to its transition into a moneymaking global force, to its role in affirming the imagined identity of Latinidad.
Daddy Yankee, born Ramón Ayala, said he imagined Barrio Fino in part as an antidote to reductive portrayals of life in the projects. “The news you see everywhere is always marginalizing [the barrio], or blaming it for things that aren’t its fault,” he said in a 2005 interview. The barrio in question was Villa Kennedy, the caserío, or public housing project, where Yankee cut his teeth freestyling at 13 years old. At 16, he started recording his own mixtapes, hawking bootleg cassettes for $5. In the early ’90s, reggaeton hadn’t quite consolidated into the genre we know it as today; one of its precursors was known as underground, and Yankee was one of its preeminent practitioners. The Puerto Rican government used the music as a scapegoat for the proliferation of gangs, petty crime, and drug addiction. Then-Governor Pedro Rosselló implemented an anti-crime campaign that also targeted underground artists, leading to police raids of record stores that sold their cassettes in February 1995.
By the time Barrio Fino rolled around, Daddy Yankee was a star in Puerto Rico. He’d appeared on DJ Playero’s foundational underground mixtapes in the ’90s and had local hits with solo albums and compilations, like 2002’s El Cangri.com, 2003’s Los Homerun-es, and Luny Tunes’ Más Flow anthology the same year. He knew the sweet spot between bombast and pillow talk, and he knew how to speak about reggaeton’s favorite topic and to its primary audience: women. Above all, he was the kind of rapper who could ensnare you with an irresistible hook, only to stun you with a technically dazzling verse moments later.
But not everyone was a fan of Daddy Yankee—or reggaeton at all, for that matter. Most of the entertainment industry had blacklisted reggaeton, refusing to play it on the radio, in spite of its grassroots popularity. White middle- and upper-class communities in Puerto Rico and across Latin America scorned the genre, associating it with poverty, vulgarity, and Blackness. In interviews around the time the album was released, Yankee wasn’t afraid to point out the irony in the genre’s commercial success, given its previously denigrated status. “When we started, no one wanted to help us. There is racism, classism in Puerto Rico,” he told The New York Post in 2005. Later that year, he elaborated on the prejudice the genre faced in The Washington Post. “The government didn’t understand the subculture. To them, we were just criminals and dumb kids doing this music. We had to prove we were too smart for the system. And we did it.”
El Cangri modeled his career after hip-hop moguls like Jay-Z or Sean Combs, building a kingdom with music at the center. But part of that enterprise was an identity movement, too—a thesis about a generation of young people who saw reggaeton as an affirmation of their heritage, one that would yield the questionable, feel-good promise of representation. “Reggaeton means the same thing to Latino youth as hip-hop does to African American kids,” Yankee told The Washington Post in 2005. “The young kids now, they’re looking at Daddy Yankee and Tego Calderón and Ivy Queen like kids in the American hood look up to 50 Cent or 2Pac.” In his vexed invocation of hip-hop, Yankee creates an ideological distance between Latinidad and Blackness—as if the two are mutually exclusive, or as if young Latines couldn’t also feel kinship with it. In addition to the muddled racial politics, Yankee’s comments back then speak volumes about the marketing, public reception, and stylistic choices of Barrio Fino.
Artistically, Barrio Fino is the ultimate exposition of Daddy Yankee’s gifts. The album slots party tracks right next to political statements; bleeding-heart breakup anthems next to brutal tongue-lashings against his enemies. The first quarter of the album is a perreo fight club. On “King Daddy,” an early avowal of his supremacy in the genre, he snarls a threat to a hater in double-time: “Tomorrow you’ll be food for the birds on the asphalt,” he spits, glass shattering in the background. Producer duo Luny Tunes arrange sputtering snare rolls into machine gun blasts. RIP to their victims.
“Dale Caliente” is a reggaeton shoot-out complete with samples of cocking handguns and sprayed bullets. Daddy Yankee issues a warning to anyone who thinks they’re tough enough to square up, then lusts after a woman who’s igniting the dancefloor with her trembling ass cheeks. Glory and Blacka Nice, an unsung reggaeton diva and a dancehall vocalist, pepper the track with some breathless ad-libs. Neither are credited on the song, a fact that reflects one of reggaeton’s more iniquitous traditions: the excision of its Jamaican and femme contributors. Glory famously sang the “dame más gasolina” hook on the smash hit; she also has features on three other songs here, none of which are credited.
In some moments, Daddy Yankee returns to his rap roots, sidestepping reggaeton altogether. “Santifica Tus Escapularios” is a merciless attack on his foes, recalling the freestyle battles he grew up on. He aims vicious barbs at an unidentified adversary (rumored to be fellow reggaeton trailblazer Don Omar at the time), even referring to his target as a shit-eating vagrant. “Salud y Vida” incorporates tubas from Mexican banda, evoking Chicano rap classics as Yankee casts doubt on a culture obsessed with material things, rather than human life. On the highlight “Corazones,” Yankee gets political. The song tackles the “spirit of death” that devours Puerto Rico’s caseríos, calling for a truce between gangs and decrying the government for not putting enough resources into education.
In spite of his lyrical dexterity, some of these beats rely on predictable conventions of “conscious” hip-hop—theatrical minor-key pianos, church-choir flourishes (it’s like El Cangri strapped on a backpack and fastened it as tightly as he could). But the messages they carry are potent, and only slightly diluted by those choices. Daddy Yankee—the world-weary critic, the caserío documentarian—was always capable of making more than club anthems, even if the radio was hyper-fixated on the party-hard ethos of “Gasolina.”
And while most listeners outside of the Caribbean thought that reggaeton could only be about stunting or bumping uglies, El Cangri demonstrated the genre’s romantic textures, too. “Like You” is a suave R&B-reggaeton serenade delivered in Spanglish, a rare crossover maneuver that invokes Big Pun’s “Still Not a Player.” This is a far cry from the unflinching raunch of earlier reggaeton mixtapes, like DJ Blass’ Reggaeton Sex series, and evidence of the way artists and producers were softening the genre’s roots for radio appeal. The classic “No Me Dejes Solo” features Wisin y Yandel, whose vocal registers make them ideal yelling partners; all three reggaeton vanguards beg a woman to save them from loneliness with their signature barked raps. “Tu Príncipe,” with Zion y Lennox, is a perfect slice of narrative-driven reggaeton, telling the story of a man who longs to be more than just a woman’s friend.
Although he was far from the only one moving the genre in this direction, Daddy Yankee was making strategic, market-oriented artistic choices that happened to feel authentic, too. Stories of breakups and relationship woes may seem like pretty run-of-the-mill thematic fare for reggaeton in 2024, but just two years before Barrio Fino’s release, a Puerto Rican senator launched a campaign against reggaeton’s “dirty lyrics” and lewd content, calling it a trigger “for criminal acts” (Tellingly, the same politician appeared onstage during a stadium show with reggaeton icons Héctor and Tito el Bambino a year later). Romantic tracks were a way to “clean up” reggaeton for the radio, but they also felt like a natural artistic evolution as reggaeton’s popularity surged.
It’s basically impossible for a reggaeton artist not to scream “Latino!” in one of their songs at this point, but back then, the explicit overtures to a shared ethnic identity were newer. On “Like You,” Daddy Yankee appeals to the community twice, summoning all his “Latinos to stand up” and declaring himself “proud to be Latin.” On “El Muro,” he refers to reggaeton as the sound that makes “everyone in Latin America move,” closing out the song with a call for all Latinos to keep perreando. The classic “Lo Que Pasó, Pasó” lifts piano keys and a horn section from Dominican merengue, while “Sabor a Melao” taps salsa legend Andy Montañez as a guest vocalist. As the scholar Wayne Marshall has written, these choices—speaking to a Latine audience, invoking elements of culturally accepted genres like salsa and merengue—helped fuel the perception that reggaeton was the music of a wider community, one with a “recognizably Latin” sound. At the same time, these stylistic changes began to shift its perception as a stigmatized Black genre from the projects.
Even if the Daddy Yankee of 2024 does not look anything like the Daddy Yankee of 20 years ago; even if the reggaeton lion largely abandoned social commentary in his work; even if, in the 2010s, he began to churn out mostly middle-of-the-road pop-perreo hits, including Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” perhaps the most diluted version of reggaeton possible—that is until Justin Bieber hopped on the remix and went viral after he flubbed the lyrics in a vaguely xenophobic drunken haze at New York celebrity hotspot 1 OAK; even if he announced his retirement in 2022, only to return to the public eye late last year as a born-again Christian: Barrio Fino is unquestionably an artistic triumph. It captures Yankee at his peak—as an agile lyricist, cultural envoy, and forever hitmaker. The album, along with other reggaeton titans of the era, forced the Latin music industry to re-examine its aesthetics, its business interests, and its biases. And of course, Barrio Fino is also an artistic proposition—a statement about poverty and sex and joy and hardship, and the ways reggaeton has soundtracked all of those realities. In its movements between the dancefloor, the bedroom, and the block, Barrio Fino illustrates the capaciousness—and complexity—of a genre forever defined by transformation.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


Brian Eno’s run of rock albums in the ’70s was an unprecedented achievement in music built on aleatory synth settings, fiery guitar work, subconscious lyrics, and of course, Oblique Strategies.

Brian Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets / Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) / Before and After Science

God, what a mind. What a songwriter, what a singer, what a producer, what a musician Brian Eno was in the days when he was habitually calling himself a “non-musician.” That was one of his many dry jokes: since his skills didn’t have to do with manual dexterity, he figured they fell in a different category from those of the musicians he worked with. Eno had been playing synthesizers in Roxy Music until he quit in mid-1973, but his primary “instrument” was the tape recorder. (At one point, he owned 31 of them.) Between 1974 and 1977, his extensive recorded output included four studio albums of his own songs—the three reviewed here and 1975’s Another Green World.
Eno is one of the smartest artists who’s ever made a pop recording. His is the kind of smartness that can trip itself up through overthinking, or make for art whose interest is mainly formal. But he dodged that bullet thanks to his other great obsession, which is giving up his conscious mind’s control. He had a particular fondness for setting up systems complicated enough that they could take him somewhere unpredictable; he famously never wrote down his synthesizers’ settings, in order to avoid falling into habits with them. Eno often sang his songs before he figured out what their lyrics were, composing them sound-first and word-second so his subconscious concerns could bubble up. “It is important to remember that all my ideas are generated by the music,” he told an interviewer in 1977. “The music is the practice that creates the ideas that generate the discourse.”
Also, he liked to rock out. His first solo album, 1974’s Here Come the Warm Jets, lunges out of its gates with the gigantic tone-bending riff of “Needles in the Camel’s Eye.” It’s a startlingly simple song—its guitar solo is essentially just the major scale you learn at your first lesson—made glorious by Eno’s fanatical attention to details of arrangement and timbre, and by his one-of-a-kind voice, precise and heady, with the long, rounded vowels of a former chorister.
That’s not all Eno got from the church hymns of his childhood. Like his other ’70s rock records, Warm Jets includes a handful of songs that you could easily think were sacred music if you only caught their melodies. The church appeared in his language, too—there’s a slaughtered heifer preceding the long, terrifying Robert Fripp guitar-spasm that’s the centerpiece of “Baby’s on Fire,” and something like an Our Father emerges from the title track’s deep-in-the-mix lyrics. Even the title of “Needles in the Camel’s Eye” is a mangled Bible quote.
Eno might have gone on to duplicate the album-tour-album-tour pattern of Roxy Music, but the Warm Jets tour was cut off early when his lung collapsed. Once he recovered, he worked almost entirely in the recording studio with a new tool he developed in that period in collaboration with visual artist Peter Schmidt: Oblique Strategies. It was a set of “worthwhile dilemmas”: cards containing cryptic instructions. Whenever he hit a creative impasse, he’d draw a card at random and figure out a way to apply it to the situation at hand. The first Oblique Strategy that Eno wrote was “Honour thy error as a hidden intention”—a very Scriptural way of putting it, and another manifestation of his push-pull relationship with control. (Another famous Oblique Strategy: “Repetition is a form of change.” The demand for a repetition of these albums’ original format has changed them into something experientially different: with this latest reissue, they’re double LPs, with each original album side’s sequence split in half and mastered at 45 RPM.)
A smutty stack of playing cards had appeared on the cover of Here Come the Warm Jets; Eno’s next rock album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), was inspired by yet another set of cards, a group of postcards derived from one of the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s “model operas.” There’s a touch of peculiar Orientalism about some of these songs (especially “China My China”), a self-consciously mythologized version of what “Asia” might be. For the most part, though, Eno’s lyrics here more generally evoke travel and dislocation—the album’s brilliant in medias res opening line is, “When I got back home I found a message on the door/Sweet Regina’s gone to China, cross-legged on the floor.”
Eno’s main musical collaborator on Tiger Mountain is Roxy Music’s virtuosically flexible guitarist Phil Manzanera, who’s equally at home with the delicate filigrees of “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More” and the arena heroics of “The True Wheel.” But as a loss-of-control freak, Eno was also fascinated by the opposite of virtuosity, and the string section on Tiger Mountain’s “Put a Straw Under Baby” consists of members of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, a group of mostly untrained musicians faking it on classical instruments. (Eno had played clarinet with them and produced two of their albums.) Bassist Brian Turrington gets an arrangement credit for the two-years-too-early-for-punk rampage “Third Uncle,” presumably for the thrilling accident of switching to the “wrong” key halfway through the song.
After 1975’s Another Green World interleaved Eno’s gifts for secular-hymnal songwriting and texture-first instrumental music, he spent a couple of years woodshedding, more or less. He worked with David Bowie on Low and “Heroes”; he oversaw the Obscure Records label’s releases of contemporary classical music. And he tinkered endlessly with the raw materials that would eventually come together as Before and After Science. The legend is that Eno worked on somewhere between 100 and 120 songs for the album, although only the ten that ended up on it have ever surfaced. (There are no bonus tracks on any of the new releases, not even Eno’s non-album singles of the era, the delightfully hormone-crazed 1974 glam-rock yodel “Seven Deadly Finns” and a 1975 cover of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”)
Science is his most kaleidoscopic collection of recordings, partly thanks to its large cast of contributors, including returning guitarists Fripp and Manzanera, Cluster’s Möbi Moebius and Achim Roedelius, Can’s Jaki Liebezeit, and yes, Phil Collins, whose lateral-thinking drum groove on “No One Receiving” is some kind of career peak. It also reflects his fascination with the messy new sounds coming out of New York City: the title of the scrambled rocker “King’s Lead Hat” is an anagram of “Talking Heads,” with whom Eno would be entangled for the next few years. (Eno’s clipped, glassy-eyed vocal sounds less like Talking Heads than like Devo, whose first album he would go on to produce as well.) And it nods to the interdisciplinary history of what he was up to: The album came with four Peter Schmidt prints named after particular Oblique Strategies, and “Kurt’s Rejoinder” folds a recording of Dada-affiliated artist Kurt Schwitters into Eno’s jumprope-rhyme absurdities.
But Before and After Science is also the most conceptually elegant of Eno’s ’70s song-albums. He explained that he used “science” to mean “techniques and rational knowledge,” the Ithaca he was always drawn back to and always trying to escape. The first half of the album is splashing toward understanding, and the second half is drifting away from it. Almost every lyric touches on the idea of navigating bodies of water. Its closing hymn, “Spider and I,” is set in a “world without sound.”
There goes the cool jest: that impossible world is the only one in which Eno would be able to surrender his cybernetic practice. Every song Eno created was the product of his experimentation—his techniques to escape technique, his reasoning about how to bypass rationality—but his art as a musician lay partly in evaluating the outcomes of his experiments, deciding which ones were fantastically interesting, and discarding the rest. Determining what work the rest of the world gets access to is the artist’s final bulwark of control.


L.A.'s DJ Mustard is responsible for more chart hits right now than any R&B/rap producer in recent memory. His first album under his own name is a small, almost humble gesture toward his hometown, a sort of epilogue to My Krazy Life, the YG album produced largely by Mustard that instantly entered the conversation of classic L.A. rap full-lengths.

10 Summers

DJ Mustard completely owns popular rap and R&B in 2014. Both scenes (where they are separate, and where they bleed together) have long been defined by super-producers, but few—including Timbaland and the Neptunes, whose names can’t help be evoked in this conversation—have had runs as successful as Mustard’s, who has placed no less than 15 songs on various Billboard charts this year. That list includes some of the year’s most enduring songs—from Kid Ink’s “Show Me” to Tinashe’s “2 On”—but more to the point is Mustard’s total and overwhelming ubiquity. It's not uncommon this year to turn on the radio, hit "play" on a playlist, walk into a party or enter a store, and hear a succession of Mustard’s beats. His sound has become so attached to mainstream urban music that it’s almost impossible to decipher where DJ Mustard ends and contemporary rap and R&B begins.
But we should never confuse quantity for quality, and Mustard’s sound is too divisive for him to be hailed as a universal genius like some of his predecessors have been. The criticism of his beats is obvious even to his supporters: they are simple and repetitive, not just individually but when taken together, often just an easily digestible series of pulses and snaps. Recently, a video posted to Reddit that catalogs a series of Mustard-produced singles built around the incessant chant of “Hey!” generated a thousand-comment thread of skepticism if not derision. The criticism—that any idiot with a working brain and two hands could churn out these beats—is not lost on the man himself. “Everybody say it’s so easy to make my beats,” Mustard Tweeted a few days ago. “[Well] take a swing at it you should be rich [in] no time cause I am.” The tweet was punctuated by two emojis that are crying while laughing.
Yet Mustard is nothing if not an innovative producer. His innovations don’t have the creative breadth of Timbaland, no doubt, but they are innovations nonetheless, and they have helped sustain the top-level of an art form that has been floundering commercially for years. One thing Mustard doesn’t get enough credit for is solving the Rubik’s Cube that is black music in the EDM era. Prior to his rise, pairings of rap and R&B with dance music—from successful crossovers like Pitbull, Usher, and Chris Brown to mid-tier artists like Waka Flocka Flame and Just Blaze working the EDM festival circuit—were shotgun marriages borne less out of creative inspiration than survivalist instinct. These collaborations were mostly garish and sad, but Mustard found a way to bring house music (back) to rap and R&B by making it an outgrowth of his own bleepy, up-tempo beats. He did it first with Ty Dolla $ign’s “Paranoid”—which nicks the organ-like keyboard sound of many a ‘90s house song—and then with “Show Me” and Jeremih’s “Don’t Tell ‘Em”, both of which lift parts of actual ‘90s house songs. The latter two have been pop crossovers at a time when most black artists have found a ceiling over their heads, and they have positioned Mustard less as a rap strip-miner and more as a sort of spiritual heir of Afrika Bambaataa and “Planet Rock”.
But most importantly, Mustard has given rap and R&B music a center. The genesis of his sound is in Atlanta club music spanning Lil Jon to Travis Porter and parts of multiple generations of West Coast rap from Dr. Dre to Too $hort to Keak Da Sneak, so naturally, many of Mustard’s early songs acted as a bridge for the contemporary rap scenes in the South and West. But as his popularity has grown, his net has widened: not just from rap to R&B, but also from artists in Atlanta and Los Angeles to others in the Midwest (Jeremih) and East Coast (French Montana, Wiz Khalifa). Whereas producers du jour of recent vintage such as Lex Luger and Mike Will elevated a certain region’s artists over others, the simplicity of Mustard’s beats has proven to be malleable for artists with different approaches and fanbases.  Though many are still suspicious of his sound, Mustard is a uniter instead of a divider.
Despite all of that, it’s impossible to forget that DJ Mustard comes from Los Angeles. His music pulls from many places but its heart is L.A. and that blood pumps through its veins. You can hear it in the squelching, rubbery bass on tracks like “Show Me”, YG’s “My Nigga”, and his own “Vato”, but also in the sneering swagger adopted by many of the rappers who slide onto his beats. That Mustard is L.A. and L.A. is Mustard seems to be the motive behind 10 Summers, his first album under his own name. Though the title makes a grand claim—that Mustard will be rap’s overlord for 10 straight summers—the album itself is a small, almost humble gesture toward his hometown, a sort of epilogue to My Krazy Life, the YG album produced largely by Mustard that instantly entered the conversation of classic L.A. rap full-lengths.
Mustard seems to have let his poppier, dancier side dominate his productions as of late, but 10 Summers pulls his sound all the way back to the beginning, with a set of tracks that explicitly connects him to the everlasting influence of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s G-funk. It opens with a trio of songs that are reverent and distinctive only in the context of contemporary rap, but Mustard and the local rappers that lead off the album—from bigger names like Nipsey Hussle and Dom Kennedy to lesser-known entities like TeeCee and RJ—are skilled and able imitators. The whiny synthesizers and quaking bass of these opening tracks is Mustard’s sound at its most elemental and it sets the table for rapping that often amounts to very good impersonations of Snoop Dogg (the hook on “Low Low”) and Too $hort (the opening verse of “Ghetto Tales”). Though some might have wanted Mustard to piece together a star-studded album, he opens 10 Summers with an argument a certain type of chef might make: that doing the classics really well can be more satisfying than constantly trying to reinvent the wheel.
In fact, it’s when all the big names show up that the album drags a bit. “No Reason”, with YG and Jeezy, is a fun little Frankenstein of “Who Do You Love” and “My Nigga”, but what follows are a pair of tracks with big names that have the stale air of DJ Khaled’s bloated projects. “Giuseppe” is just about the most average Mustard song that either 2 Chainz or Jeezy—both frequent collaborators—have ever appeared on. And “Face Down”—the big ticket item featuring Lil Wayne, Big Sean, YG, and Lil Boosie—is a poorly mastered mess that is far less than the sum of its parts. After the delightfully slinky “Down on Me”—in which Mustard draws another line, this time to New Orleans bounce music—the album dips to its lowest point with the annoyingly squeaky Iamsu! vehicle “Can’t Tell Me”.
10 Summers closes with four R&B tracks—two songs and two interludes, all of which act almost as palette cleansers after the unrelenting hardness of the previous eight numbers. The two full tracks—“4 Digits”, a showcase for up-and-coming vocalist Eric Bellinger, and “Deep”, a radio-ready single if Mustard wants to push it—go down like cold beers on a hot day, memorable for their understated perfection. But more tantalizing are the interludes (which are hopefully previews of full tracks), one from Tinashe and the other from Ty Dolla $ign. They clock in at barely over a minute in total but are deeply tuneful, and they suggest that Mustard has digested the same funk and soul records that inspired a L.A. luminary like DJ Quik and that he’s more versatile than people want to believe.
Both interludes are also presented as random radio dispatches, and on the Tinashe interlude Mustard makes another reference to criticism of his omnipresence. It opens with a short skit in which a man and a woman switch on the radio only to hear a string of Mustard tracks. “I’m tired of this shit,” the man says to the woman as “Paranoid” plays in the background. She flips the dial and we hear T-Pain’s “Up Down (Do This All Day)", to which he responds, “Hell nah, bitch, I’m tired of this nigga.” She turns the dial once more and we hear the new Tinashe track. It’s a fair warning.


Brian Leeds—aka ambient-techno maestro Huerco S.—presents a collection of dubby, foggy dance tracks where mystery feels like the main event.

One Day

Six years ago, Brian Leeds—better known as the ambient-techno producer Huerco S.—invented a new alias, Loidis, for a one-off release. A Parade, in the Place I Sit, the Floating World (& All Its Pleasures) shared certain key characteristics with Huerco S. records. It was suggestively murky, dusted with dull glitter, propelled by four-on-the-floor beats that were more implicit than explicit. One track was 10 minutes long; another ran to more than a quarter of an hour, burbling away like an enchanted brook. It seemed to say, Dance or drift off—it’s all the same to me.
The music’s dubby pulse and foggy sound design nodded to a particular set of Y2K-era influences—Basic Channel and their Chain Reaction kin, Jan Jelinek, Vladislav Delay—that were canonical though not, in 2018, particularly fashionable. In the intervening years, those sounds have crept back around, rediscovered by a generation that wasn’t there for the first wave. Artists like Purelink, J. Albert, and James Devane have all been toying with styles associated with the German minimal techno of the early 2000s. Many of these artists, following Huerco S.’s lead, seem inspired primarily by atmospheric qualities. But on Loidis’ new album, One Day, the Kansas City producer dials up the intensity. Leeds’ first full-length under the alias aims straight for the dancefloor with a collection of trippy, springy tracks that seem designed, like a candy-flipping Energizer Bunny, to thump away until long past sunup.
A Parade, in the Place I Sit, the Floating World (& All Its Pleasures) was largely an ambient affair, but One Day’s opening track, “Tell Me,” arrives like a shot across the bow. Its quick-stepping kicks and hi-hats seem designed to match the energetic tempos of 2024’s notoriously demanding dancefloors. The hiccupping bassline pushes against the beat, like a sprinter trying to break out of the pack. In “Wait & See,” which follows, clicky hi-hats rush forward just as impatiently, tripping over their own feet in a headlong dash. “Tequa” is slower and more buoyant, in keeping with the lazy dub techno of 2018’s “A Parade,” but its forceful kick and plunging chord stabs telegraph a determination to dig in for the long haul. Track after track feels like a study in groove science—a little nudge here, a little drag there, and presto: a perpetual motion machine.
Once you sink into the music, you start to notice strange things happening in the pockets around those elastic grooves. Little wisps of tone flicker and are extinguished, regular as clockwork. Whisper-soft percussive sounds duck their heads out from behind other, equally evasive sounds, like bashful voyeurs. The central feature of “Love’s Lineaments” is a set of dubbed-out chords that feel like hesitant answers to the up-for-it bassline. With every repetition, they slide a little bit further behind the beat, notes smearing across the stave. You could get lost in a detail like that, following them as they glide, trying to parse their tangled frequencies. Tracking their motions feels like cloudspotting, or trying to fix one’s gaze on a strange bit of flotsam coming around the river’s bend.
Repetition is Leeds’ trustiest tool. Many of these tracks are little more than a handful of looped phrases spun ad infinitum. But he keeps his hands on the controls at all times, dubbing and filtering and tweaking. The marginal becomes the main event: In “Sugar Snot,” the album’s propulsive highlight, you might come for the gravelly bassline, but it’s the wiggly little drum fills that hold your attention, distracting you from the fact that the track is essentially a one-bar loop stretched out for nearly nine minutes. In “Dollarama,” he works subtractively, using filters to muffle and veil. The song’s glancing dub chords are dead ringers for Basic Channel and their ilk, but I don’t think it’s just a retro thing: In its linear sweep and refusal of the obvious, One Day is a proposal for a different kind of dancing and DJing. It’s the opposite of the jagged, percussive, electricity-zapped, resolutely digital styles of club music that have been in vogue for the past decade, and it’s just as far removed from the giddily pop- and trance-fueled techno that conquered clubs and festivals post-pandemic. The album is too understated to read as a polemic. But One Day is nevertheless a reminder that there’s room for subtlety, drifting, and doubt in dance music. Sometimes, the heart of the music lies in what you only think you hear.


Death Cab are experimenting on their latest full-length, focusing less on tunes and melody and more on electronic sound.

Codes and Keys

Leading up to Death Cab for Cutie's last record, 2008's Narrow Stairs, guitarist/producer Chris Walla claimed that they were taking inspiration from Brainiac and "heavy, sludgy, slow metal," and that the record contained a "10-minute long Can jam." But nothing on the record sounded remotely similar to those references; the jam in question, "I Will Possess Your Heart", actually ran a bit over eight minutes, and I don't think anyone mistook Ben Gibbard for Damo Suzuki. Leading up to the band's latest effort, Codes and Keys, the name-dropping returned, when Gibbard told SPIN that it was keyboard-heavy and "not guitar-based," citing Brian Eno's Another Green World as a hint of what to expect.
The claims of extended experimentation, though exaggerated, aren't as spurious this time around. Codes and Keys does sound different from the rest of the band's catalog. Soft pitter-pattered beats rustle underneath sparse melodies, while layers of extra instrumentation are placed atop already-busy arrangements. Two songs (the metronomic "Doors Unlocked and Open" and the unmoored piano meditation "Unobstructed Views") run well over the five-minute mark; swaths of gentle noise surround even the most straightforward cuts. If you come to this record looking for something as directly engaging as "Cath..." or "I Will Follow You Into the Dark", you're going to walk away empty-handed.
Death Cab still sound like Death Cab, but Codes and Keys is undoubtedly the least "pop" record they've made since breaking through to the mainstream with their last indie-situated effort, 2003's Transatlanticism. So there's new territory for the band explored here, and Walla, along with mixing maestro Alan Moulder, applies a label-money sheen that provides a decent frame for the record's sonic idiosyncrasies. But for a band so identified with exploring feelings and the details of relationships, the record comes off as chilly, diffident, and emotionally distant. The texture-heavy excursions ("Doors Unlocked and Open", "Unobstructed Views", "St. Peter's Cathedral") are adrift and without direction, while early singles "You Are a Tourist" and "Underneath the Sycamore" sound like generic versions of the band from an earlier era.
Indeed, even when the band revisits past glories on Codes and Keys' few highlights, Death Cab weirdly sound like they are imitating themselves. They borrow the baroque Brian Wilson-isms of Narrow Stairs' "You Can Do Better Than Me" for "Portable Television", copy the upward-moving bridge of The Photo Album's "I Was a Kaleidoscope" for the same structural change in "Monday Morning", and lift the basic structure of Plans opener "Marching Bands of Manhattan" for "Underneath the Sycamore". Anyone who's spent the last decade following along will get some warm fuzzies from these flashes of familiarity, but they tend to get stale with repeat listens.
The rudderless quality might owe something to the album's sporadic recording process-- eight different studios were employed, and the members of Death Cab rarely sound like they're in the same room together. Most remote of all is Gibbard. His vocals are frequently treated with effects, creating an alienating space that, excepting the moony-eyed closing hymn "Stay Young, Go Dancing", robs him of his trademark intimacy. Lyrically, he largely plays it safe, engaging in nonsensical rhymes ("When you scream/ Love you seem") and sweeping declarative generalizations. Gibbard's evocative narratives and incisive commentary, always overlooked with this band, are mostly missing.
Over the last decade, both Death Cab and the landscape around them have changed considerably; while they've signed to a major label and topped the charts, the sensitive-guy Pac NW indie rock archetype they launched a decade ago has receded from the conversation. Another sound that Gibbard had a hand in introducing, however, still reverberates: the gentle, electronic bedroom-pop that he and producer Jimmy Tamborello made as the Postal Service. Those sounds never really infiltrated Death Cab until now, but Codes and Keys doesn't approach that project's level of emotional engagement. Here, Death Cab sound miles apart from each other and, ultimately, from us.


The Philadelphia emo band Modern Baseball’s second album features a wealth of infectious songs that are both sharply observed and sharply written. You’re Gonna Miss It All mostly concerns itself with wasted time, and it's dense with both hooks and lyrical barbs.

Modern Baseball: You're Gonna Miss It All

You're Gonna Miss It All

Modern Baseball’s You’re Gonna Miss It All is a sophomoric album in multiple ways. It’s the Philadelphia band’s second full-length, for one thing. Beyond that, Brendan Lukens recently finished his second year at Drexel University, and he never lets you forget what 21-year-old college students are often like—culturally literate, if not necessarily “book smart,” blurring the line between introspective and self-obsessed, impressed by their capacity for clever wordplay and emotional awareness while knowing both of those qualities conspire to prevent people from saying what they actually feel. And due to the all of the aforementioned, Lukens is kinda full of it, too. He won’t exactly lie to you, but he’ll tell you what he aspires to be while doing the exact opposite. Observe this howler from “Fine, Great”: “I hate having to think about the future/ when all I want to do is worry about everyone but me.”
There’s a fine semantic misdirection here, and he knows it: it’s a song about how much of a pain in the ass it is to have people care about you, and all he really wants is for everyone to worry about someone other than Brendan Lukens. He can do that just fine, great? Along with fellow MB songwriter Jacob Ewald, Lukens frets over the past, future, and especially the present. He thinks about the next five minutes, the next morning, and whether his death will be cool enough to get a mention from Jim Gardner on Channel 6 Action News. And he worries a hell of a lot about himself, and how other people figure into that. It’s a lot to endure because people in Lukens’ situation get drunk most every night, stumble into relationships, and run from their problems. If you’re in this emotionally combustible state, you’ll relate to You’re Gonna Miss It All directly and deeply. If you at least recognize it in retrospect, you can just as easily appreciate its wealth of infectious songs that are both sharply observed and sharply written.
About that last descriptor, Lukens describes himself as “sharp as a tack/ but in the sense that I'm not smart just a prick.” These songs are often funny and can induce wincing recalls of your most embarrassing romantic fuck-ups, but Lukens doesn’t seem all that concerned about being liked or admirable. If he’s pissed at you, he’ll probably just say “fuck you.” If he’s excited about the fact that you sat next to him on the couch instead of ignoring him like the last time you hung out, he’ll add “niiiice” as an aside. He likes metaphor, but he's much better at literalism, so the aspirational poetics of “Notes” don’t hit as squarely as the times where he describes a lonely Friday night as “no better time for exercise wishing you were still my girlfriend.”
Which explains why Modern Baseball have namechecked Tokyo Police Club and Los Campesinos! as formative influences. That much is conveyed through similarly short and spiky songs that don’t quite fit as pop, punk, or pop-punk. You’re Gonna Miss It All mostly concerns itself with wasted time, but it doesn’t waste much itself, dense with both hooks and lyrical barbs. Likewise, Ewald’s nasal, nerdy, and needy vocals bring to mind not only David Monks and Gareth David, but elder prose-songwriting bards like Craig Finn and John Darnielle. To say they can be a dealbreaker is an understatement: upon hearing him pronounce “accoutrements,” “DIY ethics,” and “Mommy and Daddy’s data plan” in the same song or getting a little too Urkel-esque with the hook from “Broken Cash Machine” (“why did I do that?”) some people might flat-out refuse to even reach the bargaining table.
Like pretty much every guitar band these days that doesn’t immediately scan as “indie rock,” Modern Baseball have been lumped into “emo”—and yes, considering Modern Baseball are probably Weezer fans and are caught up in girl problems of their own making, that label sticks to an extent. Thing is, the actual music of You’re Gonna Miss It All is just about everything but emo, mostly some code-splitting of the pop-punk double helix. There’s shout-and-whoa power-pop (“Charlie Black”), prim twee (“Going to Bed Now”), folky punk (“Your Graduation”), all built around sturdy choruses. One thing Modern Baseball do have in common with their trendpiece peers is that they’re getting attention because they’re much, much better at making music than they were two years ago. This is evident in the songwriting, which is more confident and ambitious, but just as importantly, the production. You're Gonna Miss It All was mastered by Will Yip (basically the Steve Albini of this scene) and engineered by Jonathan Low, a guy who’s worked on the National’s records. So needless to say, it’s going to sound a lot more professional than Sports, a charmingly amateur affair that seemed content to be passed around amongst Modern Baseball’s Facebook friends.
And that’s crucial, since Modern Baseball are a band that deserves to engage a wider audience. Nonetheless, Lukens is  still dealing in small stakes. He tries to think himself into a relationship he’s trying to talk and drink himself out of. When he does make a move, he worries about sticking around too long because her roommates might hear them. He goes to apartment parties, drinks because he drank the night before, can think of little besides the smell of garlic and coffee on his breath and goes from “living like a king without you” to “living like a piece of shit without you” in about a minute. Considering their common Philadelphia homebase, a fun exercise is to imagine You’re Gonna Miss It All as the other side of the stories told on Waxahatchee’s Cerulean Salt.  Of course, the narrators are totally mismatched, but all of their songs are dysfunctional anyway. Kate Crutchfield may be singing about many of the same things, but she sounds wearier, wiser, someone you’d ensure with your secrets and seek out for advice. I don’t know if I’d trust Brendan Lukens to complete a beer run for a case of Keystone Lite, he’d probably come back with a six-pack and a funny story about the girl he met from his old high school along the way—these are the small, relatable pleasures of which a Modern Baseball song is made.


Solange’s fourth album is unhurried, ambient, and exploratory. Using everything from spiritual jazz to Gucci Mane, Solange conjures her hometown with exceptional songcraft and production.

When I Get Home

In a T Magazine interview with Solange published last fall, writer Ayana Mathis described the making of the new album as taking the singer back to “a kind of Houston of the mind.” It’s a city that figures heavily in Knowles family mythology as the birthplace of Solange and her sister. At the time of the interview, we didn’t know the name of the record, When I Get Home, which indicates that this is an album about return. Now we have music and an accompanying short film that reconstructs the Houston of Solange’s mind.
It’s not literal objectification of the past so much as a future memory of the city, an ephemeral mental grid. See-sawing bass booms from phantom slabs, wood-grained and candy-painted per local tradition. Synthesizers and samples ricochet off the tall, empty office buildings of downtown Houston, reverberating to the heavens. Black cowboys gallop through the dusk—the clip of hooves a drumbeat. Space refuse is treasure. And snatches of vocals from hometown rappers Devin the Dude and Scarface float like murmurs from passing car windows.
Three years after releasing the soul-baring opus A Seat at the Table, Solange has ditched traditional song structure and world-weary lyrics for a sonically and thematically ambiguous record that feels freer, and less burdened by the white gaze. Although Houston is the beating heart at its core, much like New Orleans pulsed through A Seat, the music’s spectral, free-associative quality suggests that the idea of “home” is less rooted. Solange offers a fundamental lesson of those who leave: Home isn’t something you can possess, it lives on without you. Perhaps she also understands that we can’t trust our memories and so Solange gives her music motion. We slide into this “Houston of the mind,” on a repeated refrain that reinforces the slipperiness of recall: “I saw things… I imagined/Things… I imagined.”
The music is so in motion it’s hard to pin down. Its obliqueness does not give it automatic significance; instead, like in jazz or drone music, engaged listening instigates feeling. Because Solange doesn’t offer a clear thesis like on A Seat at the Table, the onus falls on the listener to get close and make their own meaning. That can be a liberating creative impulse, particularly for a pop star who is widely considered an auteur. Solange and her musical collaborators—for what it’s worth, nearly all men aside from Abra and Cassie—duck and weave through various time signatures, burying Easter Eggs beneath bold keys, Moog magic, and textured drum lines that embellish the omnipresent low end. There are samples, background vocals, and additional personnel credits to people representing Houston’s past, present, and future: from Phylicia Rashad and the poet Pat Parker, to Solange’s young son Julez Smith II, who has a production credit on the interlude “Nothing Without Intention.”
When I Get Home is exploratory, but still kind of glossy. The melodies on “Down With the Clique” and “Way to the Show” could be rearranged remnants from her first album Solo Star, released in her teen pop days. Pharrell, the king of sheen, shows up with his signature four-count intro on “Sound of Rain,” a song that perfectly channels the kitschy, pixelated optimism of late ’90s/early aughts futurism. He also brings his toolkit staples of tightly wound drums and syncopated piano for “Almeda,” an early fan-favorite because of an unexpected feature by a baby-voiced Playboi Carti who raps about diamonds shining through the darkness on a track where Solange heralds Black ownership. We’re in Houston, so only one track hints at the time Solange recently spent in Jamaica. “Binz” is a wall-slapper, waist-winder, booty-popper. The airy three-part harmonies that have been her true calling card since covering the Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness Is the Move” ascend over a dense arpeggiated bassline, and then give way to playful back-and-forth toasting between Solange and The-Dream that echoes the incantations of Sister Nancy: “Sundown, wind chimes/I just wanna wake up on C.P. time.”
Solange is frolicking here, using a freeform template that aspires to the endlessly uplifting magic of Stevie Wonder, the psychedelic pleasures of chopped and screwed music, or the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and the Arkestra of Sun Ra. One of her chief collaborators throughout is John Carroll Kirby, whose solo music could only be described as New Age. Standing on the Corner, a young New York City jazz group, provide some sublime moments of drama and tension—a perfect template for the gestural, post-modern, Kate Bush–esque choreography that Solange prefers.
When I Get Home is particularly beautiful as an ambient piece that’s unencumbered by the emotional catharsis of A Seat at the Table—but it is missing a palpable thesis statement. Fourteen of the album’s 19 tracks clock in at under three minutes, but the patchwork effect suggests a more stream-of-consciousness bricolage than, say, Tierra Whack’s idea-led brevity. She’s got a lot of ideas, but I’m still left wondering what this album can tell us about her aesthetic practice. (Despite its title, the interlude “Nothing Without Intention” doesn’t provide a clue.) But this need for direction only matters because A Seat at the Table felt so urgent.
Here, Solange is unhurried. The album rewards repetition, in listening and in execution. Repetition can cue a meditative state; it can also be code. “I saw things I imagined, things I imagined,” she sings on the opener. “We were down with you, down with you,” she continues on “Down With the Clique.” And by the time she switches up the single phrase repetition on “Almeda,” listing with pride, “Brown skin, Brown face, Black skin, Black braids,” the album is half over and the mood, the dream state, resets.
Some spiritual traditions use repeated mantras or prayers to invite awareness and presence, others as a way to invoke the past or alter the future. Design principles teach that repetition communicates unity and cohesion—enter “My Skin My Logo,” where Solange trades admiring verses with a cooing Gucci Mane, whose name conjures an endless monogram of interlocking Gs. The song itself is childlike and loving; the macho rapper softening his nursery rhyme-flow for something that sounds like an actual nursery rhyme. It’s through repetition that Solange resurrects a timeless, formless Houston of her mind. She uses the device extensively and almost compulsively, trying to remember, trying harder not to forget, and trying even harder to situate these traditions within a wider context of Black music and culture in America.


Made from afar, primarily with the National’s Aaron Dessner, Swift’s eighth album is a sweater-weather record filled with cinematic love songs and rich fictional details.

Folklore

The phantom pang of missing someone before you ever meet them is an emotion worthy of its own word. That fated feeling of love and the passage of time is the theme that runs between Carly Rae Jepsen’s smash hit “Call Me Maybe” and the National’s antisocial romance “Slow Show”; it’s also the kind of thing Taylor Swift might write about. One of the loveliest tracks on Folklore, the surprise album the singer-songwriter made primarily with the National’s guitarist, Aaron Dessner, stands out for a strangely similar reason: a thread connecting two strangers that exists long before either realizes it’s there. “And isn’t it just so pretty to think/All along there was some/Invisible string/Tying you to me,” she sings on the delightfully plucky “Invisible String,” simultaneously recalling famous lines from Jane Eyre and The Sun Also Rises.
Folklore will forever be known as Taylor Swift’s “indie” album, a sweater-weather record released on a whim in the blue heat of this lonely summer, filled with cinematic love songs in search of a film soundtrack. There are those who already dislike Folklore on principle, who assume it’s another calculated attempt on Swift’s part to position her career as just so (how dare she); meanwhile, fans will hold it up as tangible proof that their leader can do just about anything (also a stretch). While it’s true that Folklore pushes the limits of Swift’s sound in a particular, perhaps unexpected direction, her reference points feel more like mainstream “indie” homage than innovation, taking cues from her collaborators’ work and bits of nostalgia.
At its best, Folklore asserts something that has been true from the start of Swift’s career: Her biggest strength is her storytelling, her well-honed songwriting craft meeting the vivid whimsy of her imagination; the music these stories are set to is subject to change, so long as it can be rooted in these traditions. You can tell that this is what drives Swift by the way she molds her songs: cramming specific details into curious cadences, bending the lines to her will. It’s especially apparent on Folklore, where the production—mostly by Dessner, with Jack Antonoff’s pop flair occasionally in the mix—is more minimal than she typically goes for. Her words rise above the sparse pianos, moody guitars, and sweeping orchestration, as quotable as ever.
After years as pop’s most reliable first-person essayist, Swift channels her distinct style into what are essentially works of fiction and autofiction, finding compelling protagonists in a rebellious heiress and a classic teenage love triangle. In “The Last Great American Dynasty,” she tells the story of eccentric debutante Rebekah Harkness, who married into the Standard Oil family and once lived in Swift’s Rhode Island mansion, as a way to celebrate women who “have a marvelous time ruining everything.” Filled with historical details and Americana imagery, you can see the song play out in your mind like a storybook, but it also effectively makes a point about society’s treatment of brash women. Swift cleverly draws a line between Harkness and herself at the end, an idea she fleshes out in a more literal sequel, “Mad Woman.” Out of all the songs on Folklore, “The Last Great American Dynasty” is the all-timer, the instant classic. It sounds like the latter-day National/Taylor mashup you never knew you needed—textural and tastefully majestic, with Fitzgerald-esque lines about filling the pool with champagne instead of drinking all the wine.
With Folklore’s teen heartbreak trilogy, Swift circles the same affair from each party’s differing view. “Betty” is the story of 17-year-old James trying to win back his girlfriend after cheating, a familiar crime rendered new by the narrator’s genuine remorse and belief in a love regained. It has the youthful hope of a song like “Wide Open Spaces,” yet is noticeably wiser (and queerer) than the high school romances Swift wrote as an actual teenager. First single “Cardigan” is told by Betty, whose disillusionment with James results in a sad, sensuous sound reminiscent of Lana Del Rey, down to the vocal style and casual lyrical quotation of another pop song. But the songs’ overlapping details and central framing device—of a cardigan forgotten and found without a second thought—are pure Swift, an instant memory portal not unlike the scarf in Red’s “All Too Well.” (The cutesy marketing angle for “Cardigan” is reliably Swiftian as well.) And even though “August” is considered to be the third in the trilogy, the record’s most tender, saccharine love story plays out during “Illicit Affairs.” “You taught me a secret language I can’t speak with anyone else,” she sings. “And you know damn well for you I would ruin myself.” The scenes and perspectives evoked by these songs speak volumes about Swift’s evolution as a songwriter.
The theme of Folklore is a very different way of acknowledging that people will talk, an idea that animated 2017’s trap-tinged work of minor villainy, Reputation. Swift knows her own mythology like a model knows her angles, and that’s part of what makes folklore fascinating if you maintain an open mind: a kind of reverse-engineered “mindie” project, it sonically situates her closest to Lana and chamber-pop belter Florence Welch, but may also occasionally remind you of Triple-A radio, Sufjan Stevens if he killed his more ambitious tendencies, or Big Red Machine, Dessner’s duo with Justin Vernon (see: the sparse and soulful “peace”). The album’s actual duet with Vernon, “Exile,” is a little like a Bon Iver take on “Falling Slowly,” the centerpiece of the 2007 folk musical Once: awkwardly dragging until the clouds slowly part to allow something beautiful to build. Swift is playing the long game here, and while there are no wild missteps, the album could use some selective pruning (see: “Seven,” “Hoax”).
It’s worth pointing out that Folklore isn’t a total outlier in Swift’s catalog either, or even her recent work. The tracks with Antonoff shift away from the ’80s electro-pop of 1989 and onward, but they lean into the Mazzy Star swoon of Lover’s title track, Swift’s ongoing fascination with Imogen Heap, and a twinge of the Cranberries. There are interesting images, indelible hooks, and real signs of maturity. In the dreamy “Mirrorball,” Swift likens the relatability trap of fame to a disco ball, singing of fluttering on tiptoes and trying hard to make it look effortless. “August” is a great, lusty Swift summer anthem about forbidden love, where the up-close, white-hot heat of songs like “Style” or “Getaway Car” is traded for wistful reflection in the rearview. Like the rest of us, Taylor Swift knows she’s had better summers before and she’ll have better summers again. At least she’s made thoughtful use of this one.


British Sea Power evoke an eternal 1984, when bands bridged caustic post-punk and stadium-sized pop. Dismayed by the black cloud of post-Brexit Britain, they designed this album as a beacon of light.

British Sea Power: Let the Dancers Inherit the Party

Let the Dancers Inherit the Party

For the past 14 years, British Sea Power have invited us to escape our current reality by retreating into a past one. Their Chariots of Fire chic is the least of it—British Sea Power records are invitations to unplug and bask in the beauty of nature, learn useful random phrases from foreign languages, and educate ourselves on forgotten events confined to history’s dustbin. (Ironically, this has the effect of prompting you to go online to brush up on the significance of, say, the German term “stunde null,” or investigate what exactly happened on Canvey Island in 1953.) Notwithstanding the occasional forays into film soundtracks and brass-orchestra one-offs, British Sea Power’s music has remained similarly impervious to the modern age. They sound forever ambered in an eternal 1984 when bands like the Psychedelic Furs, New Order, and Echo and the Bunnymen were building a bridge between caustic post-punk and stadium-sized pop.
However, the cruel irony about escapism is that, as the need for it increases during tumultuous times, so too does the nagging guilt of indulging in it. British Sea Power have teetered on topicality before—see: 2007’s pro-immigration anthem “Waving Flags”—but their new album counts as a direct response to their country’s current state, rather than an elaborate reconstruction of a bygone one. Dismayed by the black-cloud mood of post-Brexit Britain, the band designed Let the Dancers Inherit the Party as a beacon of light. It’s an album that emphasizes their most uplifting qualities: Yan Scott Wilkinson’s valorous vocals, guitarist Martin Noble’s glistening, Bernard Sumner-style leads, and—in the case of “International Space Station”—the sort of sweeping, stargazing melodies that imply the presence of a choir and symphony even in absentia. At the same, British Sea Power keep their capacity for epic bombast and dissonant digressions in check, resulting in their most focused, generous record since 2005’s Open Season.
British Sea Power albums have never been lacking for drama, but Let the Dancers Inherit the Party foregrounds a quality that can sometimes gets obscured in their detailed narratives and high-concept execution: emotional candor. The album’s central motivational anthem, “Keep on Trying (Sechs Freunde),” is built from a quirky Talking Heads-style disco groove and a warped German hook—“sechs freunde!”—that Yan lasciviously milks for its phonetic similarity to “sex,” like an over-enthusiastic street hustler trying to lure you into a red-light district peep show. But the phrase “sechs freunde” actually translates to “six friends”—presumably, a statement of solidarity among the band’s current sextet formation—and when Yan hits the cheerleading chorus, the song’s off-kilter essence transmutes into a comforting group hug.
By contrast, “Don’t Let the Sun Get in the Way” is one of the most rousing yet devastating songs in the BSP canon. It’s a shimmering soundtrack for blacked-out bedrooms that casts scenes of depression and prescription-pill addiction atop a turbulent rhythm that coils and crashes like waves into shore. And while Yan consults his trusty Encyclopedia Arcana from time to time, he pulls references with pointed contemporary resonance: The breezy, synth-sparkled “The Voice of Ivy Lee” name-checks a pioneer in the field of public relations—and corporate spin—to make a thinly veiled comment on Brexit-induced discord and bloodshed. “Kings of propaganda,” he sings, “Won’t you take another look at all the things you’ve done.”
As if to stabilize its weighty subject matter, Let the Dancers Inherit the Party is a remarkably steady album, at times to a fault. “You said the world was losing all its luster,” Yan sings on the opening “Bad Bohemian,” and so the group spends the next 47 minutes restoring its shine with gleaming starlit-surfaces, synth smears, and pulse-regulating mid-tempo motion. As such, brother Hamilton’s usual come-down contributions are even more subdued than usual, culminating in a closing, string-quivering reverie, “Alone Piano,” sculpted out of the Velvets’ “Heroin” haze. But while Let the Dancers Inherit the Party may not encourage the anarchic onstage theatrics that have defined the British Sea Power live experience, its cool composure belies a shrewd show of force. In the face of the political upheaval at home and abroad, British Sea Power offer a suitably British response: keep calm and carry on.


Dan Bejar returns with a brilliant and accessible album that draws from the lush sounds of the early 1980s but never forgets the importance of songwriting.

Kaputt

Every era has a sound. When considering this, it can be easy to forget that the sound developed as a way to express something. Music heard as kitsch years later was once put forth with complete sincerity. I mention this in connection with Kaputt, the new record from Dan Bejar's Destroyer, because the first thing that strikes you about the album is its unusual sound, one for which we've all developed a cluster of associations. The production and arrangements evoke a narrow window of time-- sometime between, say, 1977 and 1984, or between Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good" and Sade's Diamond Life with stops along the way for Roxy Music's Avalon and Steely Dan's Gaucho. It slides between soft rock, smooth jazz, and new romantic pop. The bass is fretless; the synths have the blocky contrast of a Nagel painting; there are heavily reverbed trumpets and saxophones that almost serve as a Greek chorus, trilling away at the end of every line to enforce the beautiful plasticity of these songs. For Destroyer, this sound is new, and it's there for a reason.
The sound casts Bejar's songs in a very particular light, and reinforces the feeling of the singer as persona. Bejar has always come across this way to varying degrees, sure, and his albums all have their own unique feel-- the rootsy art-pop of Destroyer's Rubies, the MIDI experiments of Your Blues, and so on. But here the persona seems even more sharply defined. Singing these songs, Bejar comes over as the wizened ex-playboy; he's indulged every vice, come through the other side, and now looks on amused. The cover of Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man, a record that seems to serve as a spiritual (though not sonic) father to this one, shows this figure in its quintessential form. On that sleeve, we see a man in sharp but slightly disheveled dress, a cigarette dangling from a couple of fingers; beautiful people are seated at the nightclub table, ready for another night of glamor and pleasure.
Leonard Cohen in that image has a sense of swagger, and you want to pull up a chair, have a drink, and hear him hold forth on the topic of his choice. The figure inside the songs of Kaputt understands the allure of this life while understanding equally its futility. On early listens, a couple of lines from the title track jump out and seem to serve as a thesis for the record as a whole. "Wasting your days chasing some girls, alright/ Chasing cocaine through the backrooms of the world all night," Bejar sings, as horns twist around in a bath of reverb. He sounds bemused, but not necessarily judgmental, holding two feelings in mind at once: our reflex to indulge ourselves, and the knowledge that it's killing us.
But this happens on just one level, which is what makes Kaputt so fantastic. It goes as deep as you want to go. People can miss that Dan Bejar is funny as hell-- he seeds his music with lyrical and musical in-jokes, and everyone has their own favorite lines to pluck out of his songs and admire for their concise wit. He likes surprises-- few lyric sheets have as many exclamation points. But the essential quality of all his records is complexity. They are doing a lot of things at once. Kaputt feels rich.
For one, there is the surface beauty of the sound. Some less inclined to the pleasures of the music from the aforementioned era might have an initial reaction to its essential corniness, but once you've tuned in, it sounds beautiful. The songs seem delicate and glassy and shimmering, and Bejar has toned down his quirky voice and sounds relaxed and focused. So it's easy to enjoy bumping the wet, jazzy pop of "Chinatown", which suggests the rainy streets of an old city and new dramas unfolding around every corner. Or wallow in the simple and elegant hook of "Blue Eyes", the way Bejar voice works next to Vancouver singer Sibel Thrasher, a regular vocal presence on Kaputt who sort of serves as the Nicolette Larson to Bejar's Neil Young. But "Blue Eyes" also has sly lyrical references ("your first love's new order," "Mother Nature's Son") and funny put-downs ("I sent a message in a bottle to the press/ It said, 'Don't be ashamed or disgusted with yourselves'"). More than any other Destroyer record, you can just throw this on and it sounds good, and plenty will do well stopping there. But for those so inclined, there's more to explore.
So the lite-jazz style can seem a little funny, but it can also be sad and sexy and joyous. And the writing is dense with references-- to other songs on the album, songs by other bands, to the music business, art outside the sphere of music. "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker" is the most striking example. It's a collaboration with the artist Kara Walker, whose work, among other things, probes the racial history of America. Bejar adapted the words she provided for him on cue cards, and the result is fragmented and dream-like, taking the Destroyer project to a new place. "Wise, old, black and dead in the snow: My Southern sister..." isn't the sort of thing we've heard from him before. An early demo of the song reminded Bejar of the band Suicide, hence the title. That's how things work in his world. Laughs are mixed with grim insights.
Two tracks stick out a bit here. The astonishing "Bay of Pigs", released as a single in 2009, concludes the CD version of this album, and it's the one song that feels out of place. It's longer, proggy, uses different textures, and ultimately seems to be here because it's an amazing song and as many people as possible need to hear it. Fair enough. And the vinyl version of Kaputt also has a side-long, 20-minute ambient track with just a bit of voice called "The Laziest River", which is enjoyable and immersive but not essential. Both indulgences are easily forgivable.
Bands can be brands or concepts that can be summed up in a line or two-- which is the power of brands. It's a good thing in proper doses. But Bejar's essential complexity ultimately feels human. It seems absurd to look for genuine wisdom in music in 2011, when we're constantly gorging ourselves on the all-you-can-eat buffet of post-modern web culture. But Kaputt feels wise. Like a mirror that actually points back at something better. Something you can jam and let wash over you, but also something you can use. It feels funny, tragic, artful, and ultimately true.


The Atlanta rap trio Migos return with a sequel to their career-making mixtape, letting loose a relentless volley of absurdist humor and cartoonishly aggressive threats. YRN 2 is an hour of these three bouncing oddball pop culture references off each other, racing breakneck flows through unpredictable turns of phrase.

Young Rich Ni$$a$ 2

Since breaking big with "Versace" and "Hannah Montana," the Atlanta rap trio Migos have watched their quirky triplet flow take over radio largely without them. Since then, their struggle to advance from curiosities to superstars has been threefold: They've had to remind everyone who popularized the flow, prove to naysayers that they're great at rapping, and log follow-up hits to galvanize the listener base at retail.  Subsequent releases tended to succeed at addressing one of these points at the expense of the others: 2014's No Label 2 was riddled with scathing rebukes for imitators, while the same year's Rich Nigga Timeline was an excellent display of the trio as pure MCs. Last summer's debut studio album Yung Rich Nation reached for hits and succeeded marginally with "One Time" and "Pipe It Up," though the commercial success of the album was hampered by its sequencing and a too-abrupt release campaign borne out of an arrest, incarceration, and tour cancellation. For every advance, it seemed, there was misfortune lurking in the distance.
The Migos' return to the YRN franchise this month might seem like a retrenchment, a rejuvenating dip in familiar waters, but the spirit YRN 2 most shares with its predecessor is its foregrounding of fun and chemistry. With little to prove (except a stake in the ownership of the meteorically popular dab dance), the group lets loose a relentless volley of absurdist humor and cartoonishly aggressive threats. YRN 2 is an hour of these three bouncing oddball pop culture references off each other, racing breakneck flows through unpredictable turns of phrase.
As such, it's possible that this mixtape makes a better collection of verses than a body of songs. These exercises don't always come affixed to easy hooks or inviting beats. The production comes from frequent Migos collaborators Dun Deal ("Hannah Montana"), Zaytoven ("Versace"), Murda Beatz ("Pipe It Up"), and more, but most of the sounds here revolve around dark, minor key melodies. "Chances" and "Commando" have a stark, glacial beauty that recalls early-'80s Cure. Zaytoven's "Bars" beat outfits impish piano with a bassline so deep and flat that half of it sounds like kick drum hits. It suits the trio's lurid plug talk just fine, but doesn't stand to invite anyone in that wasn't already hip to the inner workings of the Migos universe.
That's not a setback so much as a smart read on the group's strengths. While sunnier outings like Back to the Bando's "Look at My Dab" and *Yung Rich Nation'*s "One Time" helped increase the group's national profile, these records don't feel as natural on them: The songs from the first YRN tape that hit did so out of sheer force of personality, not calculated pursuit of urban radio. It happened naturally, which is a difficult set of circumstances to recreate.
Like its predecessor, YRN 2 is a carefree swing between transgressive tough talk and morning-after reflection, and the extremes have never been more extreme than they are here. Early in the record, "Plan B" unveils the group's crass paternity contingency measure: offering sexual partners emergency morning-after contraceptive medication ("I gave my bitch a Plan B cause she was my plan b.") It's a mortifying, too-real glimpse into the logistics of being a nouveau riche party animal in a field where your clout can bend morality to suit your desires and just, honestly, several steps south of fun. On the other end of the tape is the closer "Chapter 1," where the team spells out the specifics of the struggle to make it out of poverty and the precarious business of staying up and out of trouble in gripping detail. It's no coincidence that the latter is perhaps the closest thing YRN 2 offers to a surefire hit; two years on from their first nationwide exposure, the Migos continue to shine the brightest when they're not trying too hard.


Kurt Vile has absorbed a lifetime's worth of 70s FM rock, and the ghosts of Springsteen and others glimmer under the surface of his woozy bedroom pop.

Kurt Vile: Constant Hitmaker / God Is Saying This to You

Sometimes an artist pens a song title that more perfectly captures his aesthetic in words than any review could. Thoughtfully, the War on Drugs' Kurt Vile has done this with his solo work via Constant Hitmaker's "Classic Rock in Spring/Freeway in Mind". See? Done. You know exactly how that should sound-- as nostalgic, wistful, and sunlit as the title suggests, with Vile crooning softly into a Jim James-sized cavern of reverb over some finger-picked chords about "riding on your Yellow Schwinn and blasting classic rock in spring." Those are some mighty big signifiers for a twentysomething kid to be throwing around, but Vile knows his way around them like they were living-room furniture.
Kurt Vile (real name, no gimmicks) has seemingly absorbed a lifetime's worth of FM rock, and the ghosts of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, and others glimmer under the surface of his woozy, homemade bedroom pop. Vile recorded the majority of these songs on his own, and the sputter of the cheap drum software and the murmuring vocals testify to the kind of guy who doesn't want to wake up his parents upstairs. Nonetheless, even in this sleepy, abstracted form, there is no mistaking the widescreen Tom Pettyisms of "Freeway", from the wry hiccup of the vocal to the sunshower of jangling guitars that accompanies the track. Constant Hitmaker, his 2008 debut on Gulcher, snagged the ear of an attentive few, and now it is being reissued along with God Is Saying This To You, a limited edition LP, on vinyl. The sound of God Is Saying This To You is slightly cleaner and clearer than the bleary, sound effects-addled Constant Hitmaker, but that only means Vile sounds like he's singing from the bottom of a mineshaft this time instead of from the ocean floor. And it still feels like you're eavesdropping: Vile delivers every line in an amiable mumble, the sort of voice you use when you're humming something to yourself and only know every other word: "Hey girl, come on over, that'll be just fine. Two packs of red apples for the ride home," he murmurs over and over again on "Red Apples", and it sounds like the half-remembered chorus of some John Mellencamp song.
Vile has talked in interviews about his various odd jobs (he sings about operating a forklift on Constant Hitmaker) and his single, unfruitful semester in community college, and it rounds out the portrait suggested by his music: that of the talented but aimless kid in high school, the one who smoked pot every day but read philosophy textbooks in his free time, the sort of guy who identified viscerally with the borrowed blue-collar sentiments of classic rock radio. Kurt Vile channels this hangdog charm effortlessly, scrawling wayward little vocal melodies like the one on "Breathin Out" with the ease of a hesher Bob Pollard. Sections of Constant Hitmaker are bogged down with a few too many pedals-and-loops sound collages, but for most of the ride, Constant Hitmaker/God Is Saying This To You ambles dreamily along a perfect midway point between the disorientingly weird and the comfortingly familiar.


Hatchback's Colors of the Sun was first released in 2008, and its Balearic nu-disco vibe slots neatly into contemporaries like Prins Thomas & Lindstrøm. There's a touch of sunshine and open air here, a surfer's mentality, favoring low-key melodic turns and gentle movements.

Colors of the Sun

When the Weeknd premiered his latest single, "Can't Feel My Face", on Apple Music back in June, its discofied groove suggested both a "Get Lucky" retread as well as a sign that some eight years on, mid-'00s Scandinavian cosmic disco might have finally wormed its way from blog backwaters on through Cadillac car commercials and into the mainstream. How else to explain a handsome, remastered-at-Abbey-Road, heavyweight gatefold sleeve reissue of an obscure nu-disco album from California's Hatchback, first released to little regard in 2008?
Originally released by Lo Recordings and !K7, Sam Grawe's debut Colors of the Sun has since been resuscitated by upstart UK reissue imprint, Be With Records, whose catalog ranges from yacht rock demiurge Ned Doheny to South African singer Letta Mbulu. But most fascinating are the albums that Be With zero in on from the '00s, when compact discs remained the medium of conveyance and pressing up vinyl was cost-prohibitive. So far, Be With has done vinyl reissues of everything from the Streets' A Grand Don't Come for Free to a Wilco side project to Cassie's prophetic minimalist nu-R&B classic.
Where Hatchback's debut fits in amid this eclectic, baffling roster is hard to gauge. Even as a fan of everything nu-disco/Balearic of that era, I'm only familiar with Hatchback's music via a 17-minute remix courtesy of Prins Thomas (these remixes were almost de rigueur circa 2007). His music occasionally recalls the vintage keyboard squiggles of Prins Thomas & Lindstrøm or else that of Klaus Schulze.
Perhaps Grawe's perspective from Northern California gives such German and European electronic influences a touch of sunshine and open air here, a surfer's mentality informing both his Hatchback persona as well as duo Windsurf. "Everything Is Neu" might wear its krautrock heritage on its sleeve, but rather than the Autobahn, it suggests a leisurely drive down the PCH, detouring from that motorik beat with piano-laced breakdowns suggestive of Michael Rother's post-Neu! albums. "Comets" and "White Diamond" both begin as Cluster homages, before Grawe astutely adds other layers—a laidback guitar figure, a contemplative synth melody—that take the tracks into more rarefied air. And had Boards of Canada decamped for the West Coast from Scotland, they might have made something like "Closer to Forever".
In hindsight, it's easy to see how the album might have not gotten a fair shake, favoring low-key melodic turns and gentle movements rather than the grander moves of his contemporaries. Outside of a 2013 single, there hasn't been much heard from Hatchback since 2011's follow-up, Zeus & Apollo. A quick search turned up the fact that Grawe worked first at Dwell and now serves as editorial director for furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, whose ergonomic Aeron chair I'm currently sitting in as I type this. It makes a certain kind of sense that Grawe gravitated toward modern architecture and design, in that Colors of the Sun suggests an astute sense of craft, even if its expert design becomes almost imperceptible due to its functionality.


Weezy returns to mixtape form, where he shows off his digressive, distracted spirit-- still a huge part of what makes him great.

No Ceilings

No Ceilings. Nice title. Nice concept, too. Here's Wayne explaining it, on one of his new mixtape's blessedly few skits: "I would love for you to look up into the building and understand that there is no ceilings; there is only the sky." And in his case, it's true; Wayne's potential greatness seems to have no limit-- or if it does have a limit, it's difficult to say what it might be. Wayne's tough to evaluate because he's so very rarely operating at peak capacity. Whereas a classically great rapper (Ready to Die-era Biggie, say) might hammer his concepts straight on until he's bludgeoned them into atoms, Wayne barely ever has any concepts, hopscotching frantically but lazily between ideas and chasing digressions down gopher holes.
Wayne's digressive, distracted spirit is a huge part of what makes him great; even at his Carter II peak, he was always slippery and unpredictable and defiantly weird. But ever since he indisputably became the most popular rapper in the world last year, he's been in a strange zone, trusting his instincts to the point where he's now preparing to drop a whole album of somebody's idea of rock on us. And his instincts are, more often than not, bad. Add that to his purportedly staggering drug use and his upcoming prison sentence, and it's tough to tell just how far he could fall. Wayne's got no ceilings, but he's got no floors either.
And given the increasingly scattered nature of his post-Carter III work, the existence of No Ceilings is just a tremendous relief. After last year's wildly disappointing Dedication 3, Wayne's finally back to something like his Dedication 2/Drought 3 fighting shape and doing what he does best, swiping beats from all the songs on rap radio and rendering the originals obsolete. Pity F.L.Y. and Dorrough after what Wayne did to "Swag Surfin'" and "Ice Cream Paint Job". Beats like those are where Wayne traditionally comes off best; those cheap, tense, springy synthetic tracks make Wayne's berserk rasp sound something like catharsis.
Wayne's got no compunctions about snatching up a middling regional dance-rap mini-hit, and that appetite serves him well. When you throw him on something busier and bigger-budget like Jay-Z's "D.O.A." or "Run This Town", he doesn't sound quite as at home. So it's fortunate that Wayne still has a bug up his ass about Jay. On those two tracks, he just goes absolutely ripshit, throwing slick subliminals at Jay or just laughing Jay's barbs off. At least on mixtapes, Wayne doesn't have Jay's drive to build eternal monuments to his own importance; he's free to just spazz out. So, on "Run This Town": "New Orleans Coroner, his name is Frank Minyard/ Fuck with me wrong, you'll be waking up in his yard." (A Google search confirms that New Orleans' Coroner is indeed named Frank Minyard. Wayne: Backing up his insane threats with verifiable facts!)
In some intriguing ways, the rise of Gucci Mane presents an interesting challenge to this sort of Wayne mixtape. Gucci represents an evolution of Wayne's free-associative style, one simultaneously spacier and more focused. Gucci has none of Wayne's cursory desire for acceptance from NY true-schoolers, and he favors the kind of dinky, catchy budget beats that Wayne loves stealing on tapes like these. Wayne raps over three Gucci tracks on No Ceilings, as well as one from Gucci associate Waka Flocka, but he doesn't treat these tracks like challenges the way he does with the Jay songs. He probably should, since the Gucci songs are the rare mixtape tracks where Wayne can't erase the memory of the originals.
And No Ceilings certainly has its problems. Wayne might never again sound as flat-out committed as he did on Dedication 2. His punchlines don't always carry the same impact, and he's more likely to laugh at his own jokes. He shares valuable mic time with tolerable nonentities like Lucci Lou and Gudda Gudda. He picks a few tracks like the Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling", songs that just aren't conducive to great rapping. He swipes a few terrible sex-rap tracks and makes slightly less terrible sex-rap tracks out of them, though even those will dependably include a few appealingly loony lines ("I get it wetter than bass pussy" is supposed to be seductive?). He's not quite the animal he was.
But No Ceilings once again finds Wayne in total control of beats, motivated and sliding freely between ideas. He pronounces "alps" and "stealth" and "milf" like they all rhyme with each other. He's scatological: "I'm on some shit ain't even been out the ass yet." He's haughty: "Elevator in my crib cause it's five floors/ I'm not expecting you to have one inside yours." He's on his half-sensical pop culture shit: "I get big chips; you get Alvins." He's capable of coming up with lines that get stuck in your head for no conceivable reason: "I'm flyer than the highest flying bird around this ho." He's frankly disgusting: "I made the pussy gleek." And with the twin trials of prison and Rebirth looming, it's just enormously gratifying to hear that he still knows how to rap, that he loves doing it. After all, nobody does it like him.